2020 in review: The digital journey in full steam ahead

2020: The utmost test of resilience, empathy, and rapid solutions. As we entered 2020 with the same drive of enabling digital evolutions and delivering value to our clients' businesses

2020 in review: The digital journey in full steam ahead

In times of crisis, we witnessed a worldwide re-evaluation of how digital components fit into our working ways. Tech became a crucial component for business continuity. Driving our clients' journey towards Digital Evolution remained our top priority.

2020: The utmost test of resilience, empathy, and rapid solutions. As we entered 2020 with the same drive of enabling digital evolutions and delivering value to our clients' businesses, we were looking forward to yet another year of stable growth, digital explorations, and powerful collaborations. Little did we know that, in a matter of only weeks, the way of operating for many companies would be fundamentally changed by the new reality of Covid-19 restrictions.

As mentioned in a recent Financial Times article:

"No one was predicting a pandemic that would propel us at warp speed towards a working from home culture and a wholesale digital transformation of our lives… Back in April, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft had seen two years of digital transformation in two months".

We were witnessing and living a worldwide crisis, but our belief in the power of digital evolution did not wither, regardless of the unfolding of 2020. Let us look at how this translated into our work in the past year.

1st Quarter: Start in full force

We started 2020 in full force and were strongly focused on expanding business in our core industries:

  • Manufacturing and Industry 4.0: To remain competitive, manufacturers were already on their way to digitally enabling their products, investing in technology, building new capabilities, and becoming more flexible and open to change. For most of our clients, the year started with new technological implementations and challenges to integrate the human factor in their modernization projects.

  • Retail: Consistent user experience across multiple devices and channels was the focused direction for most of our retail clients. Projects to expand from brick-and-mortar shops to digital shops were already on the rise.

  • Financial and Insurance: Our clients in the banking industry have decided to continue modernizing their operations while keeping their business on the winning side. Together we aimed for future-oriented banking services, aligned with the way the industry demands.

Technology lies at our core. Therefore, our business strategy quickly shifted to stabilizing our clients' operations while preparing to continue growing. Our efforts paid off and we were still able to achieve overall business growth by the end of the year.

2nd Quarter: Assisting change for our clients

During the first lockdown in Europe, especially mid-sized and small companies were vulnerable to the economic effects of the crisis. Meanwhile, large corporations started to fully invest in becoming more flexible than ever before.

As companies all over the world have undergone unparalleled disruptions, our clients and partners were faced with the challenge and, at the same time, opportunity to prove their adaptability. For businesses, it quickly became a matter of surviving through the pressure and, depending on their strategy, thriving after the crisis.

Accesa's previous work with clients in many different industries has shown us that our clear Digital Workplace strategies lead to enhanced business efficiency. The most impactful results of implementing modern collaboration tools are:

  • Data accessibility from multiple sources and smooth onboarding of new employees through an already existing structure with all the required information at hand.

  • Real-time communication and collaboration with modern chat tools and document-editing solutions that allow working on several documents at the same time.

  • Enabling cloud services to be used to the fullest, harness the power of cloud services

Enhance a collaborative environment

Some of the most urgent challenges both our clients and we were faced with included enabling remote work and the tooling needed to ensure remote collaboration, infrastructure and data security while working from home.

We focused on supporting and enhancing our clients' collaborative environments by bringing in a set of standard processes, clarity of roles and responsibilities and opening new positions in the areas where we believe we need to be better prepared

Keep the lights on

The crisis has hit several companies hard, pushing them towards a digital approach that forced them to keep the lights on 24/7. With incident management and monitoring services, we ensured that our clients were using the infrastructure to its full potential. Monitoring systems avoid disruptive factors such as downtime or data loss. Real-time data reports help with more agile decision-making, which in turn had a positive impact on response time to immediate business needs.

Ensure operational resilience and efficiency

Some companies had to adapt their core and repurpose their assets to gain efficiency and stabilize operations as fast as possible By empowering businesses practices that enable the highest level of organizational resilience:

  • safeguarding data security and managing the transition processes to digital platforms

  • delivering the same quality and maintaining trusted partnerships even fully remote

  • ensuring a reliable infrastructure for new opportunities of stabilizing online-based businesses

3rd Quarter: Ensuring operational stability

Our main objectives during the 3rd Quarter were to further adjust and strengthen the quickly implemented solutions we deployed in Q2.

Accelerate intended utilization

We continued to deliver digital solutions to our clients based on lessons learned from the 2nd Quarter. It enabled us to better meet the needs of our clients and improve the agility, usability, and responsiveness of operations without increasing their costs.

Cloud Computing

For those who have been shying away from digital transformation before, rushed migrations were a great 2020 challenge. Cloud providers have been growing at a minimum of 15% per year, according to the latest ISG index. Due to the pandemic, they grew rapidly in the first and second quarters of 2020, despite the general economic downturn.

Drive the future of work

Digital Workplace is the solution for companies that want to remain competitive, and it looks like it will be the future foundation of our working lives. People and technology are the two pillars of success when it comes to digitizing corporate resources. Of course, change always brings disruption, so that we focused on building a clear digital workplace strategy to outweigh these challenges.

4th Quarter: Stepping into the future

In a year of changes, we also marked a substantial evolution in our company's story: the consolidation of our partnership with Ratiodata, which translated in us becoming part of the Ratiodata Group and the Fiducia & GAD family. The companies strengthen their partnership to provide a joint high-quality and client-oriented service. The strategic partnership, which has been in place for four years, is now ready to generate even more sustainable growth and achieve higher standards in the global IT industry.

With compatible cultures and common core values, Accesa and Ratiodata began a strong collaboration that has already proven to be a catalyst for change. Its extension comes just in time to underpin their visionary, client-focused strategy of offering even more comprehensive IT solutions together. The new business approach will keep the focus on the financial & regulated as well as unregulated industries such as manufacturing and retail.

Final thought

Indeed, 2020 was the year in which businesses became aware of criticality and accelerated the pace of their digital journey. As challenging as it proved to be, we kept our promise to our clients and were fully invested into adapting fast, working hard and delivering value through customer-centricity. It has been a rollercoaster with a rich set of lessons learned, which can only drive us further in our quest for shaping the best possible digital journeys for our clients. 2021, here we come.