Gartner Offers Business Model Advice re: Coronavirus

IT industry researcher, Gartner Inc., has issued a five-phase approach to strengthening the resilience of organizations during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Companies tend to have traditional strategies and plans that focus on the continuity of the resources and processes but omit the business model,” said Daniel Sun, research vice president at Gartner. “However, the business model itself can be a threat to continuity of operations in external events, such as the global outbreak of COVID-19.”

The company is therefore making five specific recommendations to CIOs that can be valuable to channel partners, as well:

Phase 1 — Define the business model: Facing the contingency of COVID-19 outbreaks, companies should first focus on their core customers that are essential to their continuity of operations, and then refer to a process of defining their current business models by asking questions focused on their customers, value propositions, capabilities and financial models.

Phase 2 — Identify uncertainties: Given the wide range of uncertainties and threats, this step can benefit from a group of participants with diverse backgrounds and interests, particularly where IT is normally involved. Companies should focus on the risks that the uncertainty poses to the components of the business model.

Phase 3 — Assess the impact: Multidisciplinary members should form a project team to assess, or even quantify, the impact of the identified uncertainties.

Phase 4 — Design changes: Develop tentative strategies. CIOs and IT should leverage digital technologies and capabilities to facilitate the designed changes.

Phase 5 — Execute changes: The strategies for changes defined in Phase 4 provide essential input for this decision process. Senior leadership teams should select the strategies they feel most compelling to implement, which is often based on both economic calculations and intuition.

Once senior leadership teams select the business and IT change initiatives, CIOs should apply an agile approach in executing the initiatives. Gartner recommends that they can form an agile (product) team of multidisciplinary team members, enabling the alignment between business and IT and ensuring delivery speed and quality.

Gartner clients can learn more in the report “React to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak via Raising Business Model Resilience.”

Channel Impact^®
Although CIOs and channel partners do not normally lead the process of defining business models, they should proactively engage with senior business leaders to ascertain the necessary adjustments during the pandemic.