CIOs See Pandemic Tools Shaping Post-Covid Enterprise
March 02 2021 - 5:29PM
Dow Jones News
By Angus Loten
Many companies -- led by those in the front line of the
coronavirus pandemic -- changed the way they did business last
year.
Some are planning to make those alterations permanent, offering
a glimpse into postcrisis markets, corporate technology leaders
say.
Among the biggest permanent changes are a shift to remote work,
in-home and other contactless customer services, and a far greater
reliance on digitally enabled collaboration, they say.
"We were sharing information with our supply chain and
clinicians about how to best care for patients in their homes,"
said Carissa Rollins, chief information officer at insurer
UnitedHealthcare Services Inc. "We really need this collaboration
to continue," she said.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's virtual CIO Network
summit, Ms. Rollins said the company, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth
Group Inc., quickly expanded its programs and services during the
pandemic.
That included a sharp increase in the use of virtual-care visits
aimed at serving more patients in their homes, she said. The move
required ramping up digital tools and infrastructure to support
video and other capabilities. "We will continue using these tools
post pandemic," Ms. Rollins said.
She said another new service that won't go away is a virtual
symptom checker, which was deployed in the early days of the
pandemic and has since been used more than 150,000 times.
Juan Perez, chief information and engineering officer at United
Parcel Service Inc., said the pandemic drove some of the most
significant changes in the company's history.
At the height of the crisis, as more homebound consumers began
ordering products online, UPS saw the volume of deliveries jump to
34 million packages a day, roughly double pre-pandemic levels, Mr.
Perez said, speaking at the event.
"For us to do that successfully, closer interaction with our
customers was critical," he said. "I think the pandemic has really
opened up those channels," he said.
Although the company had the necessary infrastructure in place,
he said, the pandemic has accelerated a push to increase its use of
cloud-based software as a service. "The process that we needed to
do work needed to be adjusted," Mr. Perez said, "SaaS has become
critical to UPS."
Together with its own systems, Mr. Perez said UPS has the
flexibility to rapidly scale computing needs to meet unexpected
surges in demand. "The ability to support the network remotely has
changed, too," offering still greater flexibility, he said.
UPS delivered an estimated 96.7% of packages on time in the five
weeks before Christmas, compared with 95.1% for FedEx Corp. and
93.2% for the U.S. Postal Service, according to ShipMatrix Inc., a
software provider that crunches shipping data.
More recently, UPS marshaled the digital resources needed to
distribute vaccines around the globe, fast-tracking a new system to
handle medical shipments. "We were in the infancy of developing
that and now we're accelerated it," Mr. Perez said.
Grocery stores, restaurants, hardware stores and other retailers
also expect a range of services deployed during the crisis -- such
as preordering, curbside pickups and other contactless transactions
-- to become business-as-usual in the future, industry analysts
say.
Above all, corporate decision making around deploying digital
capabilities has been put into overdrive by the pandemic, a
positive change from the pace of pre-Covid information-technology
projects, both technology executives said.
When delivery volumes began to soar last year, UPS quickly
realized that requiring signatures from package recipients was no
longer feasible. That required a rapid change in the digital
technology that underpins delivery confirmations, Mr. Perez said.
"We couldn't really debate that too long.
"The speed with which we have had to make decisions has
transformed the way we work as a team," added Mr. Perez.
Write to Angus Loten at angus.loten@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 02, 2021 17:14 ET (22:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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