The Impact Of COVID-19 On IT

The global epidemic, which made it necessary to adapt to the digital environment, has clearly proven to the whole world that the only way to adapt to the crisis is digitalization. With Covid-19, people have learned to work remotely and embrace the virtual world. Seeing these changes as a part of life and understanding their effects on social life started to make our work easier.

Covid-19 and Digitization

The epidemic has shown us how important digital connectivity is to ensure business continuity. Businesses have had to consider both how their employees can work most effectively and how they can best meet customer demands. Research shows that technology infrastructures are sufficient for employees to work from home around the world. So, many businesses that have adopted the remote working style with Covid-19 are signaling that they will continue to do so permanently after the epidemic.

Employees have made remote working an opportunity to increase their comfort rather than seeing it as a method of protection from the epidemic.

How Did Covid-19 Affect IT?

Businesses have begun to accelerate their transformation to meet the needs and changing demands of their customers in the pandemic period. Adapting to digitalization was crucial to maintaining their productivity.

Its main goals include improving information security, making remote working a good experience, ensuring digital continuity, and increasing operational efficiency. It is important to manage the process by looking for business opportunities to process data better. When the epidemic entered our lives, businesses that had the necessary infrastructure to go digital, carried out this transformation without any problems. Thus, they continued to produce without wasting time. At this point, we can see how important the policies and technology infrastructure of an enterprise are.

With the pandemic conditions, companies are faced with many questions that need to be answered in the long run. Some of those might be as follows: Which technology should one invest in? Which projects should continue? Should we update our company strategy? How should the next year's budget be planned? etc. The first goal of companies is to keep producing value in accord with digitalization after the epidemic. They are trying to make the right plans for their investment in technology. By analyzing their digital capabilities, they need to strategically address their business model. The second goal is to improve the remote working experience. With the epidemic, it has become clear that working remotely can be cost-effective and efficient. With the digitalization of business processes, it has become possible to work independently of time and place. Thus, companies are considering adding this practice to their policies permanently.

The number of people who need to access information resources increased as a new tendency/necessity emerged: working remotely. IT managers spent a lot of time making the new way of working they planned to be efficient. After the remote work resources were distributed, digital transformation projects started to pick up where they left off and even benefited from such.

Organizational Transformation of IT

With the pandemic, a new normal has emerged in companies as well as in society. With the change in the required competencies, changes are beginning to occur in the structures of the companies. It is of great importance to establish teams that can respond to technology.

We might be able to list some important features in this transformation process:

• Establishing agile teams that can adapt to changing conditions.
• Ensuring agility, flexibility, and scalability by establishing micro-teams. Thus, cloud-based systems will become more effective.
• Structuring of joint services for cost management.
• Supporting innovation.
• Taking precautions against security risks.
• Determining the remote working style.

Additionally, HR departments of companies faced several challenges, one of which being the lack of face-to-face contact. The stress of working remotely has made the need for e-learning mandatory. With these challenges, the IT and HR teams began working more coordinated. Then naturally, team communication between them has increased and new organizational methods came right after. No doubt such new tendencies will keep reproducing as digitization leads the path!