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April 29, 2021
Digital urgency or true transformation?
After rushing to implement teleworking and reinforce their cloud structures, local companies are facing a new challenge: obtaining competitive advantages from new technologies.

Anyone working at home right now knows: the digital acceleration of businesses, driven by the pandemic, had an unprecedented boost during 2020: OnePoll and Citrix's Digital Shock study claims the advance is among the six months and year. However, the big question that remains floating in the air is to what extent Argentine companies used these technological advances to capture opportunities and improve their business or effectively advance towards digital transformation and to what extent they were used to “patch up” business issues and guarantee continuity in a time of crisis.

“Many companies that were not technologically up-to-date had to 'patch up' to survive, but many later managed to prepare in another way and focus on optimizing and transforming their business,” says Juan Ozino Caligaris, co-founder and country manager of the platform. integration, administration and monitoring of cloud Nubity environments. The expert says that although all the steps taken, even by obligation, are part of the digital transformation, "the changes must be sustained over time and generate a positive impact on each organization for us to speak of a true evolution."

The acceleration, however, is palpable. "The continuity and level of use of digital solutions and channels have prompted companies to transform them into permanent options and key pieces of their business strategies," agrees José Ramón Jiménez, director of solutions at the Practia consultancy, for whom " the IT managers of our main clients agree that it was achieved in twelve months what was expected to be achieved only in several years ”.

The coronavirus, above all, broke down cultural barriers in terms of incorporating new technologies that seemed more than established. "A positive aspect, moreover, is that it broke down some barriers to change driven by urgency and the need to guarantee business continuity, and this new mentality is fertile ground to face new projects and processes of change and innovation", indicates Esteban Samartin, COO of SAP for the South Region. “It became clear that innovation is not only for large corporations or for market leaders, but it is fundamental for any organization, regardless of its size or sector: innovation is no longer just a matter of competitive advantage or efficiency, but also survival ”, Samartin remarks.

The customer at the center

One of the great paradigm shifts seen in many companies is the repositioning of the customer at the center of the strategy. “The pandemic helped us to work in a delocalized way and led us to digitize some processes in which we used paper; but the decision to change was already taken years ago ”, says Rafael Rizzo, CIO of Grupo Los Grobo, an agribusiness company that provides products, services and knowledge for the food chain. Among the initiatives that were accelerated are collaborative tools and the home office, led by Paradigma. "They were part of a project that we had been working on for months, but the pandemic made us perform a big bang to which our users and clients adapted in record time," he says. → Apertura Magazine (April 2021 Edition). By Walter Duer

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