Here’s what agility means right now, when it counts the most

April 16, 2020

When we speak of agility, it’s often in terms of how it can help businesses get new products to market faster or adapt to shifting customer preferences – this is during normal times.  In today’s environment, for many businesses it means mobilizing resources effectively at speed, in order to survive.

Institutions — public and private alike — are pivoting as fast as they can to answer the challenges posed by the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), and DXC Technology is no exception. Like many other companies that supply critical services, we’re moving rapidly to ensure that we’re able to provide the support our customers need while safeguarding our employees’ health and well-being.

As a provider of essential services across many foundational industries, we take our responsibility seriously. We’ve evaluated each customer’s needs to ensure we can deliver at least the core service needed to keep critical business components and services available for each customer.

We’ve made many adjustments to put people in the places they’re needed most. But this is exactly the benefit and purpose of a large technology services operation. Our ability to rapidly scale our services up or down enables our customers to meet the immediate needs of their businesses, citizens and patients. Some customers, such as airlines, have a temporarily reduced need for support but still require DXC to maintain critical systems. Other clients have increased their support requirements by as much as 200 percent.

DXC responds

Responding to a crisis is never ordinary, but answering the needs created by a global health emergency is especially challenging. In other circumstances, rebalancing the change in service demands would be a straightforward task. In this case, however, we’ve had to make wide-scale adjustments in our operations as service requests have grown.

In areas where governments have restricted movement to reduce the spread of the virus, we’ve equipped our employees and our customers’ employees with appropriate technology and connectivity to work from home — many for the first time. In one example, a large multinational customer discovered that its service desk provider was unable to provide remote support to employees after a work-from-home order was issued. DXC deployed a cloud-based solution and delivered a new, fully functional contact center just 48 hours later.

An aerospace and defense industry client approached us to help meet the requirements that would keep them functioning. In a matter of days, DXC enabled thousands of employees with a technology solution so they could work remotely and maintain productivity despite closed offices and mandated shelter-in-place orders. The following week, thousands more additional key personnel were enabled to work remotely, using secure, reliable technology.

DXC has also been helping first responders. A large police force in Europe has faced special challenges during the COVID-19 crisis, but DXC provided technology to connect and collaborate to help the organization continue serving the public. Additionally, the police force can now interact remotely for training, interviewing, collaborating and more.

And here’s one last great example of how IT companies can help in this time of need. DXC deployed a large number of devices for the opening of a temporary hospital. In just 2 days, our teams built and deployed hundreds of devices to support the first COVID-19 patients in this temporary location. And in under 2 weeks, the DXC team secured many additional devices and enabled all the resources and logistics needed to support the operation.

It is regrettable that anyone must face the type of circumstances we are all facing at the present. At the same time, however, we can take heart in knowing that by working and innovating together we can get resources to where they are critically needed to help companies continue serving their own customers. This is what agility means right now, when it counts the most.