During the pandemic and the following lockdown we have seen an unprecedented collaboration between large multinational corporations to the small one-man-band business in order to help collectively get us through this crisis. Namely, some of the big companies in the construction and engineering industries have come together to build medical ventilators – such as Airbus, Microsoft, Red Bull Racing and BAE Systems. We also saw the transformation of vast complex spaces such as Manchester Central and London’s ExCeL Center into some of the worlds largest care units for those in critical need.
Businesses have also come together massively within themselves to ensure that functions continued as close to normal as possible wherever it was able to do so. We have seen a huge surge in the number of virtual meetings and sales pitches, with working remotely now the new-(improved) normal for many employees across the world; not just in Manchester and the rest of the UK. There has been the need to keep going many of our emergency and essential systems such as rail, motorways and general utilities; all of which have embraced the power of the cloud in order to ensure that they could continue to operate.
The technologies that we have all become accustomed to incredibly quickly; such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts and Skype, have started to fight fiercely in order to gain market share by enhancing their own USPs to ensure that people get the best from their service. This ultimately profits the end user by ensuring that the push for market share produces better, more innovative platforms to ultimately speed up and improve business productivity through the cloud.
As an example, design projects are now able to run through an embedded platform within Microsoft Teams; called 3DRepo and BIM 360 which enables people to always be connected and collaborate across projects seamlessly. We can also see that there are hugely interactive pieces of design and workshop software called Miro and Mural which let people work together on projects, add notes, stickies, line diagrams and mind-maps to help design strategies and workflows.
Furthermore, Calendly is pushing Zoom sales meetings to become the new-norm with free automatic integration, which enables the user to set Zoom as the meeting location; and automating the invite process, setup of zoom meetings and diary management to ensure a seamless process for sales meetings – face to face is becoming a thing of the past with the benefit of opening up a market to traditional sales teams.
These technology examples are designed as a one-size fits all approach to allow your business to make the most of the current situation and keep up with the times; and people within all businesses are now starting to realise that we are creating a new future that will be much more technologically enabled; with the reliance on traditional location-based technology finally starting to meet its downfall. The cloud-enabled way of working will now become an expectation and essential part of the way all businesses work; both with customers, employees and suppliers – the stakeholders will expect ease of access and use of all business tools no matter their location.
This increased amount of agility around a business’ process has been enabled by the situation; with the famous quote “Necessity is the mother of invention” never truer. But what must your business do in order to ensure that it is ready to move with these times and push for a more cloud-enabled future?
Change with it, design your processes around this new-normal and execute it with your employees on board. This is incredibly important because it means that you get buy-in from employees at an early stage. It then means that they come with you on that journey and advocate the new tools and systems from within. Bespoke cloud software is also an incredibly powerful tool because it means that a piece of technology can be designed and built solely with your business and its aims in mind; and works with your business flexibly – which is so important in such uncertain times.
To get started, we have a free software review that we can go through with you to understand which areas of your business could potentially benefit from a new build of bespoke cloud software to help you accelerate forward out of lockdown and future-proof your business.