In June I wrote about the digital acceleration nobody asked for. Six months later, the dust has settled enough to see what was real and what was panic. The answer, as usual, is both. Some of what organisations adopted in March will define how they operate for the next decade. Some of it is already gathering dust.
What You Need to Know
- Remote work capability is permanent for most knowledge-work organisations. The question is now about hybrid models, not whether remote works.
- Tool sprawl from crisis-era purchasing is the biggest near-term operational challenge
- Organisations that had digital foundations before COVID are measurably ahead of those that didn't
- NZ's early COVID containment gave enterprises a window to plan that other markets didn't get
What Stuck
Remote and Hybrid Work
This is permanent. Not the "everyone works from home forever" version. The "we no longer assume office-first as the default" version. Every client we work with is planning for some form of hybrid arrangement. The debate about whether remote work is productive is over. The debate about what the right balance looks like is just beginning.
92%
of NZ organisations plan to offer remote or hybrid work options post-COVID
Source: MBIE, The Future of Work in NZ, October 2020
The organisations handling this well are treating it as a design problem, not a policy problem. They're asking: what work is best done together? What work is best done alone? How do we structure the week to support both? The organisations handling it badly are trying to recreate the office over video call.
Digital Customer Expectations
Customers who were forced online have recalibrated their expectations. They've experienced what good digital service looks like. They won't tolerate being told to visit a branch, post a form, or call during business hours for things they could do online at midnight.
This is the biggest structural shift. Customer expectations moved permanently in 2020. Organisations that revert to pre-COVID service models will lose customers to competitors who kept the digital experience.
Cloud Adoption
The organisations that had cloud infrastructure adapted in days. Those running on-premises scrambled for weeks. That lesson wasn't lost on anyone. We're seeing cloud migration projects accelerate across our client base, driven not by cost savings but by operational resilience.
What Didn't Stick
The Tool Bonanza
I predicted this in June and it's playing out. Organisations that bought ten SaaS tools in ten weeks are now discovering that eight of them overlap, six of them aren't adopted, and four of them are costing money for no measurable return.
The most common question I'm getting from clients right now is "we bought all these tools, can you help us figure out which ones to keep?" The emergency is over. The bill remains.
Isaac Rolfe
Managing Director
The tool audit is becoming a standard engagement for us. Map the stack. Identify overlap. Measure adoption. Make deliberate decisions about what stays. It's not glamorous work. It saves organisations significant money.
Video Call Culture
The novelty of video calls wore off months ago. What replaced it is a quieter recognition that video calls are exhausting, often unnecessary, and frequently less effective than a well-written document or a quick phone call.
We're seeing a healthy correction. Meetings are shorter. More communication is asynchronous. People are questioning whether a meeting is necessary before scheduling one. This was a change that the industry needed and COVID forced it.
Digital Transformation Theatre
Some organisations treated the crisis as an opportunity to look digital without being digital. Online forms that generate PDFs that get printed and filed manually. Customer portals that are skins over legacy processes. "Digital transformation" that digitised the surface without changing the substance.
That theatre is being exposed as operations normalise. The organisations that genuinely transformed their processes are faster and more resilient. The ones that applied a digital veneer are discovering that the veneer doesn't hide the underlying inefficiency for long.
The NZ Advantage
New Zealand's early success with COVID containment gave enterprises something rare: breathing room. While organisations in other markets were in continuous crisis management, NZ businesses had periods of relative normality to plan, invest, and build.
14%
GDP contraction in NZ Q2 2020, recovering to +14% in Q3
Source: Stats NZ, Gross Domestic Product: June 2020 Quarter
That V-shaped recovery in Q3 translated into budget availability. Organisations that might have frozen all technology spending instead invested in the digital capabilities COVID had revealed as critical. Our pipeline in Q3 and Q4 was stronger than any previous year.
What 2021 Looks Like
We're heading into 2021 with a few convictions.
Hybrid is the model. Not fully remote, not fully office. The organisations that design hybrid well will have a significant advantage in talent attraction and retention.
Data matters more than tools. The tool glut of 2020 has made it clear that tools without good data underneath them are expensive decorations. We expect data quality, data architecture, and data governance to become priority investments.
Speed of change won't revert. Organisations experienced faster decision-making in 2020. They liked it. The pre-COVID pace of enterprise technology adoption, conservative, committee-driven, eighteen-month procurement cycles, will face pressure from leaders who now know faster is possible.
NZ enterprise technology is maturing. The market is bigger, more sophisticated, and more demanding than it was twelve months ago. The bar for what constitutes good enterprise software has risen. That's good for organisations like ours that compete on quality. It's challenging for those who compete on price.
2020 was the year that tested every assumption enterprise technology held. Some survived. Many didn't. The organisations that learned from the test, rather than trying to return to January 2020, will define the next era.