Friday, December 18, 2020
I was reading back over my predictions for 2020 from last year’s Christmas/New Year blog. Boy was I wrong 😊 (see blog from last year here), but then again, I think most people could not have predicted all that has happened in 2020. 2020 has been the most difficult year to navigate in my professional career, but thankfully, it has not been all bad.
One of my predictions did come true, though. In 2020 clients accelerated to the Cloud at an unprecedented rate. We can see it in many parts of our business. We have achieved double digit migrations to Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS and in the Finance & Supply Chain Management aspect of our business, we successfully completed close to 100 BestPath assessments, evaluating the best ways for customers to move to the Cloud. You can read one case study from Orango in Sweden, here.
What Did we Learn from 2020?
- Cloud is good for companies in general. Besides the cost efficiencies, Cloud gives the flexibility of working wherever and whenever. Companies that were already in the Cloud with their IT infrastructure, when the pandemic hit, have been less affected on average than companies, who were not.
- Planning has been a bit of a waste of time in 2020. Altogether, we have done about 4 revised plans in 2020 and none of them predicted what happened. The budget did not predict the stop in incoming orders from mid-March to mid-May, but then in June we saw a very large order in-flow, which we did not predict in our first forecast. From July to September, there was more vacation going on than normal, but order flow slowly started to normalize by mid-September. Maybe we should not plan so much and in so much detail.
- Social distancing / isolation is not healthy for human beings. The virtual events and team buildings that we are trying to compensate with to have some social connection are not quite the same as being together in the same room.
- Humans are a resilient and creative species. The influx of new ways and new ideas throughout 2020, and how fast we have all adapted has been amazing, and it gives me hope for other areas where we, now, are also in crisis, such as the economic crisis and the environmental crisis that we are facing, will be areas that we will solve, together.
So, what about predictions for 2021? Well, I can share our assumptions in our high-level plan (sic) which is that we will be locked down until spring (at different levels in different countries). There will be more traveling happening than in 2020, already in the spring, but there will probably be a requirement from the airlines that you have a vaccine. After the summer, more and more people will be getting a vaccine and life will normalize more and more. 1ClickFactory is bullish about 2021 and 2022 and we have planned to expand our staff by more than 20% throughout 2021. We think that the transition to cloud, whether total or hybrid, will continue. My prediction is also that people will spend a lot of time meeting physically and partying from the summer and onwards 😊.
I want to thank you all for your continued support in 2020. We should all be grateful for the amount of business we have been able to do in 2020 (at least when you think about harder hit industries such as the travel industry). The IT industry is doing well, and you could even say it is “hot”, when you see the amount of acquisitions and mergers that have happened in 2020.
Merry Christmas and best wishes for 2021. Hopefully we will get a chance to meet physically in 2021; it is my sincerest wish.