Covid-19 may exacerbate the digital divide among businesses

What is the essential task of management? To look after the short term in ways that not only protect, but even enhance medium and long-term prospects. For businesses, the COVID-19 crisis presents massive challenges to fulfilling this quest; it is difficult to pull off even in periods of growth

The Covid-19 pandemic shines a spotlight on the systemic risk to global business

This crisis is a metaphor for our general failure to entertain, let alone take actions to mitigate, global systemic risk, writes Leslie Willcock

A digital catch-22: after the crisis, who’s betting on digital transformation?

Many organisations attempt digital transformation, but failure is five times more likely than success. Digital transformation is not a piece of cake. It requires redesigning the whole organisation and involves large-scale change. Being slow to adopt digital technologies may reduce risk in the short term but builds growing business risk and reduced competitiveness in the long term. And this trend will be repeated and magnified by the growing adoption of automation and ‘AI’ over the next five years. Leslie Willcocks writes that there are ways out of the digital catch-22, but senior executives responsible for digital transformation will need to take a much bigger view of the change process, if the potential business value of digital investments is going to be realised

Digital transformation is difficult. Which technologies to bet on?

The general view is that the 2020-21 pandemic has been already accelerating the adoption of automation, and moves towards digital business. There is strong evidence for this, and for the trend to continue across the 2021–2025 period. And indeed the case for these technologies has been well made by our 2020 experiences. The technology worked. It provided alternative ways of working in a crisis. It allowed a high degree of virtuality, and all the upsides to that, in a world rendered physically semi-paralysed, albeit temporarily. It would be a foundation for building resilience in the face of increasingly uncertain business environments, and future crises. But when we talk of the technology, in fact there are many emerging digital technologies. Which to bet on

Covid-19: business must get ready for the new abnormal

Future scenarios research uncovers six major trends that accelerated during the pandemic, writes Leslie Willcock

Remote working: here to stay?

The answer is not straightforward: net productivity gets a boost, but other factors come into play, writes Leslie Willcock

Nine likely scenarios arising from the growing use of robots

The future of work is less predetermined and more nuanced than many think, write Leslie P. Willcocks and Mary C. Lacit

Business automation in investment banking: fast forward…. or not?

The technology says fast forward, but the organisation says it’s going to take a lot longer than you think, write Leslie Willcocks and Andrew Crai

Businesses will increasingly use robots to deal with theexplosion of data

The term “Robotic Process Automation” (RPA) connotes visions of physical robots wandering around offices doing the job of humans. However, the term really means automation of service tasks. Let’s think of business processes such as transferring data from multiple input sources such as email and spreadsheets to systems of record like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Here the term RPA most commonly refers to configuring software to do the job

A new approach to automating services

Companies are achieving productivity gains by using software robots to perform routine, rules-based service processes. If implemented well, such automation can result in high-performing human-robot teams, in which software robots and human employees complement one another