For last few years, a lot of our vision, plans and targets were being explicitly made for 2020. After the turn of the millennium in 2000, the year 2020 was the most awaited. And how it came!
All of us have discussed enough about the pandemic, its impact on businesses and what it means for technology. Most of the discussions have a few common takeaways: it was an extraordinary disruption, businesses were impacted severely, role of technology got appreciated better, and new winners and losers emerged based on their ability to handle the change. Details, of course, vary.
The CIO&Leader November 2020 Cover Story captures the entire year in just seven aphorisms that you may identify with. Unlike other years, it did not require one to painstakingly go through major events, select what are the most important and trying to find some trends. The overwhelming trend is top of mind for all of us. We wanted to identify the most important manifestations?and how they influenced our thinking.
Talking of thinking, beyond the webinars, WFH, contactless deliveries, OTT streaming and digital payments, we have important lessons from the pandemic.
First and foremost, we learnt to live with constraints and minimum needs. We realized the difference between our needs and wants.
We realized our greatest of planning are no match for the fury of nature. The pandemic, now believed to be an intentional human creation by many, wreaked havoc among the entire mankind. Some of the other disasters like extreme weather events and climate change in general could be far more dangerous. The role of technology is also to effectively help in fighting them, not just to make us bigger, faster and smarter.
Once again, it is human intelligence and resilience that proved to be far more useful than planning based on old knowledge. It is a direct message to us that agility of planning is more important than how detailed it is.
Overall, 2020 made us pause, rethink and restart. But human tendency is to forget quickly. As we enter 2021, we listen to the news of COVID vaccines being launched. Hopefully, we can leave 2020 behind as a memory that taught us many a thing and look forward to better times in 2021.
