The COVID pandemic has changed our world in ways that most of us would never have believed was possible. Something that has surprised me, is how quickly the general public have become comfortable with data. Particularly the charts being shown on our nightly news with cases on logarithmic scales. Every man and his dog can now explain what flattening the curve means, even if they don’t exactly understand exponential growth and decay.
Image from: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-13/coronavirus-numbers-worldwide-data-tracking-charts/12107500?nw=0
The changes on work have been equally dramatic, with the vast number of office workers now working entirely remotely. The April COVID-19 Impact Survey from Dresden Advisory Service, which is focussed of the attitudes of technical roles, highlighted two areas that are a direct result of the changes to work following COVID-19. These are the importance of Self-Service Analytics and Cloud Computing for Analytics. From February to April there was a 9% increase with 34% of respondents now considering Self-Service Analytics critical to their business.
"a desire and need to apply data and analytics to help identify potential options and solutions for the current challenging business conditions” Dresden Advisory Service
Interestingly, similar attitudes have been reported by the PwC Pulse Survey which brings together the attitudes of CFO’s. Their May 11th US update reported that 49% of CFO’s rated technology investment, as a key to improving their company in the long-term. Additionally, at a time of extreme cost-cutting, only 15% of CFO’s are considering cuts to their digital transformation spending
What this means as a whole, is that we as a general population and a workforce, have a much greater understanding of data and its importance in effectively managing a situation. We have proven that remote working is possible, and can be productive and efficient with appropriate tools that enable us to self-serve. Based on the attitudes of CFO’s, the next period will see our companies investing in more cloud based tools that enable their workforce to make data driven decisions through self service analytics as we navigate out of isolation and back to work.