COVID-19 may exacerbate the digital divide among businesses

Not all organisations will come out of the crisis in the same way or at the same level of business health, writes Leslie Willcocks

 
What is the essential task of management? To look after the short term in ways that not only protect, but even enhance medium and long-term prospects. For businesses, the COVID-19 crisis presents massive challenges to fulfilling this quest; it is difficult to pull off even in periods of growth. Previous downturns demonstrated how problematic it is to ride out, for any length of time, dramatic falloffs in sales, inventory problems, customers defaulting on debts, running out of cash, and delayed new products. Understandably, businesses focus on short-term survival and adaptation. Then begins the slow process of recovery. How are businesses responding this time? And what role will digital technologies play?

By August 2020, as part of the research for a new book Global Business: Strategy In Context (SB Publishing, forthcoming), we had surveyed and assessed how large international organisations across sectors were planning, over 2020-21, to recover business and leverage digital technologies. We compared the results to similar surveys during the 2000-2003 and 2008/9 economic downturns (see research note at the bottom).

Συνέχεια ανάγνωσης εδώ

Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk