27 Mar 2020 A comforting positive note in dark times
It’s getting more and more difficult to be positive and to see the silver linings let alone the light at the end of the tunnel.
Quite apart from the deep personal toll that COVID-19 is taking, it’s making business impossible. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Imagine a sales meeting 6 months ago. This could have been for virtually any enterprise software but let’s say it is for a Source to Pay suite. When the question was asked “what if we had a global pandemic and we all had to work at home, how would your solution hold up?” The answer would have been easy. Because the software is in the cloud, the implementation could happen with virtual teams. While face-to-face is better, it’s not unusual to have design workshops over video conference and as far as operations is concerned, it’s irrelevant where the user is. Indeed, modern S2P solutions are designed to support remote and mobile users. There wouldn’t be an issue.
But that is not the way it’s working out for many and legacy thinking as well as some real world challenges are conspiring to frustrate many projects and operations.
So it’s great to see the occasional spark of optimism and positive outcome from a dire set of circumstances. There was a great story from Miriam Hatai on LinkedIn that I read today about hundreds of hospital beds being urgently sourced in the space of 30 minutes utilising Ariba Discovery. As James Marland commented: “Sometimes I get discouraged about not being a “key worker”. But stories like this remind me that somehow, we’re all part of the solution. Like finding 500 hospital beds in 30 minutes to help build a new hospital in 14 days.“
