A meme has gone viral over the internet about who is leading the digital transformation in organizations. The meme also took a playful twist by putting the COVID 19 virus as an option alongside the usual suspects – the CEO and the CTO

But the meme did highlight a reality: to ensure that people were kept safe and to help stop the spread of the virus, public and private enterprises moved their employees, those that could, to work from home.
The Chinese term for crisis is “危 (wei) 机 (ji)” – the Chinese believe that with every danger 危, there also exists an opportunity 机. Indeed – the organizations, in their bid to avert the danger of total shutdown also chanced upon an opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation, alongside the chance to implement hybrid work conditions for employees, a trend that would most definitely continue even after the pandemic ends.
The digital strategy that was in the background and in many plans, been scheduled as “in the near future”, is now pushed into the spotlight. The ability to quickly leverage digital technology is now a key to long-term business resilience.
But should a micro-organism be given all the credit for what is a fundamental change to the nature of business? The benefits of digital to business and consumer alike, especially in the pandemic cannot be overstated. Take online retail for example. According to Arab News, major retailers in Saudi witnesses a huge growth in e-commerce last year . But it would also be wrong to neglect the fact that online retail has been growing as a more than respectable pace in the region. One only has to look at the growth of online e-commerce platforms like Noon.com to realize that consumers in the Arabian Gulf are behaving like their counterparts in the developed world, changing their habits to purchasing more online. Before the pandemic, data site Statista recorded an annual growth in the UAE’s e-commerce sector in excess of 20% from 2015 to 2019 .
But it is not only developed economies that leverage digital technology. Let us take a look at Somalia, a country that is devastated by drought, famine and continues conflict. Even under these conditions, Somalis drove the most active mobile money markets in the world. A report published by the World Bank indicates that mobile money has superseded the use of cash with over 70% of adult Somalis using mobile money services regularly. The mobile money is used for salary transfers, bill payments, remittances and cash transfers, and savings in mobile wallets .
This mass adoption happened without the consumer protection norms and know-your-customer requirements that are familiar to consumers in developed economies. However, this is what is evident: there are huge opportunities to be acted on as more and more people around the world utilize digital technology to facilitate their day-to-day living.
Coming back to the million-dollar question at hand – who led the digital transformation then? If the question had been who accelerated the digital transformation in the company, then personally, I feel the virus would win this one hands down (or maybe spike down). But the gears driving digital transformation were already in motion, enabling digital technology to meet the demands of changes in human needs and consumption. This was evidently led by humans, on the both the demand (consumers like you and I) and suppliers (people who ran the company like the CEO and CTO). As the world slowly picks itself up from the ravages of left by the pandemic, let us continue to have humans, not micro-organisms, be in charge of our destiny.
Do you agree?

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