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Within the last five years, most organizations around the world began some degree of digital transformation. For WATG, 2020 was the year we would push forward the boundaries of our own digital revolution further into the cloud, away from the physical constraints of space, servers, and onsite solutions. Naturally, the events of early 2020 became the catalyst that accelerated our plans – forcing us to quickly refocus resources, realign budgetary priorities and redefine our five-year strategy.

We were not prophetic

Early in 2018, we challenged ourselves to become less reliant on physical boundaries, office space, and time – increasing our collaboration, speed, and response to our clients – while keeping exceptional design at the core of our vision. At the highest levels of our firm, we committed to an investment in innovation and world-class technology.  Between our design professionals and our technology teams, we created multi-year plans through 2025. In 2018, we laid the infrastructure framework and foundation. In 2019, we changed our workflow processes around telecommunications, virtual meetings, enhanced collaboration software, training, and dedication to virtual firm-wide solutions.

We would like to think we were prophetic, but we were not. Like everyone, we didn’t see these changes coming so quickly. In early 2020, our entire firm had to respond so rapidly we thought that we would experience a massive bottleneck. Fortunately, our framework, foundation and our collaborative, fearless culture proved to be successful. The events of this year catalyzed the most agile-centric, fast-moving, virtual work environments we were only hoping to achieve years in the future.

Fast forward to now – actions for 2021 and beyond

Things aren’t going back, at least not all the way. Early indication shows a high and mutual interest between employees and firms that Work-From-Home (or a hybrid thereof) is here to stay – good or bad. With that, our firm, and others, will need to be proactive to address what is desired by our clients, our talent and our leadership. What we do know for sure is that we must continue to focus on agility and continue to investment in technology and communications.

The three key areas of focus for our strategic planning and investment decisions are:

Agility – our clients will expect delivery times to continually accelerate in the years to come. The younger generation is accustomed to faster, more agile solutions and coupled with an app-driven world, this creates endless options for how we communicate, collaborate, and deliver our design.

Faster Collaboration – faster, more responsive solutions for communications and design technology – moving systems to the cloud and onto globally-shared platforms for round-the-world design teams.

Sustainable Efficiency – from the amount of electronic and paper files that circle the globe, to a more efficient workflow, we are thinking about to how to use less energy to in every facet of the firm – our travel, our office operations, and within our own communities.

Innovation decision criteria

Looking ahead to 2021, we are asking rigorous questions to drive our investment balance and choices. For example, do we invest less in the future on our physical space and on-premise technology? Do we shift those resources to new virtual environments and solutions – empowering our employees no matter where in the globe they decide to plug in and work? Striking the right balance is key and our goal is to find that harmony between our real estate footprint, our global workforce, and our culture.

We are examining everything through this lens – design process, work flow, finance, risk management and human capital platforms. As these areas are digitized and automated, for a global firm like ours the payoff comes in time, quality, released capital and efficiency, increased accountability and better metrics.

The end-game

We have all read the stacks of research over the last six months. And we know many organizations will muddle through 2020. But winning organizations change their business mix and adopt a culture of continuous innovation. We know that to maintain our own market leadership position, we must continue on our path of digital agility to disrupt not only our industry but disrupt our own business.