The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has left a profound impact on everyone’s personal and professional lives. Organizations worldwide have undergone radical changes on a large scale to keep up with the challenges caused by the pandemic. Several new IT trends such as remote working, use of online collaboration tools and services, virtual meetings, and more have been on the rise to mitigate the lack of physical connection and social distancing challenges. Almost all companies that were either unaware or underusing the potential of digitalization realized the importance of technology to bridge the gaps in the workflows. Now that the world is slowly recovering from the pandemic and is beginning to go back to normal, we believe that some of these new IT trends are here to stay and have the potential to become the new reality even post-pandemic.
Rise of digitalization and digital transformation
Due to the pandemic, businesses worldwide have witnessed an unprecedented rise in digital transformation. COVID-19 has forced organizations ranging from retail, IT, health care, supply chain, and education to take radical steps toward adopting digitalization.
Several technologies and digital solutions such as AI-powered solutions, collaboration services, and more have been aiding organizations to keep up the operational continuity and secure their businesses. While the need for remote work may slightly reduce post-pandemic, organizations need to ensure that they leverage the most out of the evolving digital solutions not just for streamlining the business processes but also to keep the business costs in check.
Collaboration tools
Regardless of their field, almost all organizations have been striving to achieve stable communication and collaboration among their teams. With teams working remotely, several businesses, especially in IT, education, and retail, have faced severe hits during the onset of the pandemic. Thankfully, several collaborative tools and services such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom have received a major overhaul in terms of their features and capabilities to meet the growing needs for collaboration.
Collaboration tools are already making their way to be integrated alongside the primary mailing solutions within the organizations to serve as a common means of communication across the organization. Moreover, several ERP solutions have also started packaging collaboration tools alongside other business-essential applications. While business applications and their composition keep changing, it is evident that organizations will continue leveraging the collaborative platforms to maintain an easy digital connection among the teams even after the pandemic.
More immersive eCommerce
In the past few months, governments worldwide enforced some form of lockdowns to prevent the spread of disease. People were forced to shelter-in-place in their homes, and many businesses had to adapt themselves to meet the growing demands with pace and efficiency. Now that almost all of us have adjusted to the convenience of using eCommerce for our everyday needs, the eCommerce experience is likely to be further improved and even grow in the post-pandemic world.
Several businesses started leveraging digital solutions and technologies to keep up with the growing demands. Meanwhile, consumers started to appreciate the importance of these small- to medium-sized digital eCommerce businesses, which will continue to add digital solutions post-pandemic.
Several retail chains have started implemented kiosks for contactless payment and deliveries of goods and products. If retail and eCommerce keep growing at a similar pace, we could soon see a transition from traditional stores with cashiers to a contactless digitized sales mode through a direct-to-customer (D2C) business model — an IT trend already on the rise.
Evolution of traditional workplaces
A vast number of organizations are taking the initiative to support and encourage their employees to work remotely. Many businesses, including several tech companies, already announced that they will continue to allow employees to continue working remotely even post-pandemic.
On the flip side, many companies and SMBs were not ready for the sudden shift in the traditional workplaces. However, the ongoing pandemic forced everyone to adapt to this new reality. As a result, organizations started revamping their workplace policies by implementing collaborative platforms to bolster the communication and collaboration among the teams even while working remotely. Post-pandemic, a likely business IT trend could be organizations adopting more digital solutions to ensure smoother operations through remote working.
Online education
The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on the education sector alongside businesses. Although not ready for the online transition, many schools, colleges, and universities were forced to implement online courses. This created mayhem for the education boards, students, and instructors. While the transition itself was cumbersome initially, the online education system is now in a position to become an emerging business trend. Schools and colleges are operating at a fraction of their operational costs due to the online education trend by saving on infrastructural, maintenance, and operational costs.
While most of us are still not accustomed to this digital transition in the education sector, a portion of academia, if not all, will likely keep leveraging this emerging trend of online education to bridge the physical and geographical barriers.
Post-pandemic IT trends: Moving forward to a new world
The COVID-19 pandemic has left a profound impact on our lives, affecting individuals as well as businesses. While we have faced a catastrophic impact on several of our everyday activities, we still overcame them. Similarly, businesses have bolstered themselves to meet these challenging times by weaponizing digital solutions and technology. The “new normal” that we all are waiting for might continue a majority of these trends among several others in areas including but not restricted to supply chain, use of cloud services, digital marketing, health care, and others.
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