On Friday, Twilio, a cloud communications platform, announced that it is powering the communications for New York City’s contact tracing initiative. The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) is planning to deploy a cloud-based contact center based on Twilio Flex, leveraging Twilio SMS and Voice as key parts of the City’s COVID-19 tracing program.
Organizations around the globe and across every industry have faced unprecedented disruption over the last few months — having to quickly stabilize their business and meet the new needs of their customers and communities, in addition to adjusting how they operate.
Earlier this year, our Connectivity Benchmark report found that 92% of organizations are currently undertaking digital transformation initiatives or plan to in the next year. While some organizations paused their digital transformation projects,
As we plan for a safe reopening of the workplace while navigating the complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations are balancing immediate and long-term needs in order to protect employees and ensure business continuity. Organizations are contending with new challenges as they lead through crisis, from empowering teams and managing IT operations remotely, to ensuring a safe and connected workplace.
COVID-19 isn’t just revealing issues across society, health-care preparedness, and business continuity — it’s also revealing new omnichannel capabilities for retailers beyond “curbside pickup” or a flash message about pandemic hardship.
My customers say that the new ways of working brought on by COVID-19 have made a significant impact on the technology transformation initiatives they’re currently executing. Trying to do the same (or more) amid unforeseen circumstances is unsurprisingly not as productive. Projects and programs have been put on hold, reprioritized, or canned completely.
With unprecedented circumstances comes unpredictable demand, changes in customer behavior, finding new ways of working, and the need to meet new demands. Companies that have adopted cloud computing and have a scalable architecture in place for their core business systems saw little disruption with COVID-19 despite this unanticipated change.
Scalability enables businesses to meet the needs of their customers seamlessly, even when a sudden change in capacity occurs. IT makes this level of scalability possible by creating an infrastructure that can adapt to a spike or drop in transactions.
The COVID-19 crisis has drawn out many of the best sides of our collective character. We are surrounded by inspiring stories of ad-hoc collaborative action to solve this truly human crisis, from doctors sharing notes over email in search of a shared understanding of the virus, to cross-border teams forming to source essential PPE from around the world.
What happens when enterprises must shut their door to avoid public health risks, yet business still needs to continue?
This article was originally published on ProgrammableWeb.
Since February, ProgrammableWeb has been following the COVID-19 outbreak. During that time we have tried to keep our readers up to date on new resources being made available to developers who want to join the fight against the pandemic. For example, to support developer efforts, over 60 COVID-19 related APIs have been released along with all kinds of open-source code,
Just a few months ago at NRF 2020: Retail’s Big Show, I heard Ajay Banga, CEO and President of Mastercard say that humility must be at the heart of change and innovation. His statement gave me pause. It felt counterintuitive to the traditional view — that significant change or innovation stemmed primarily from intelligence, creativity, and experience — but it resonated with me. The truth is, so many challenges and opportunities arise from unexpected or unfamiliar situations where there isn’t an obvious solution.
