The role of emerging technologies in managing the required changes in operational structures necessitated by market trends accelerated through the global pandemic

Abstract

During the past few years, the global pandemic has presented new challenges to both public and private entities. Some technological trends that would prove essential to overcoming these challenges were already clear in pre-pandemic years. However, the imposed Covid-19 restrictions generated the need for faster implementation and hence led to an accelerated uptake and embrace of such systems. It was evident that companies were not yet ready for such a drastic adaptation, and so needed to find ways and means to manage this change. Companies resorted to various emerging technology, amongst which are AI, IoT, Cloud Computing and even serverless computing in some cases. This research study aims to uncover methods of how entities worked around these challenges through adopting these new technologies and attempt to measure the extent of the adaption acceleration. A sample of 13 different companies was taken to conduct qualitative analysis through in-depth remote interviews regarding the different related topics. The sampled companies were divided into essential and non-essential as well as private and public entities to further analyse how different types of business structures were affected. The results extracted from these interviews where critically analysed with a thematic approach to highlight the key take-aways. Moreover, other aspects like human resources, financial aspects and communication had to be re-evaluated by most companies. The discussion also proved that most companies had to adapt to emerging technology in a shorter period of time than was withing their comfort zone. This proved to be a struggle to some companies since technology projects that were forecasted to take a few years had to be implemented within a couple of months. This research also concluded that some technology implementations that were adopted to overcome this pandemic will still be used within the different businesses since now they have adjusted to such working conditions.