In today’s digital business context, the use of IT has a significant impact on the organisation’s environmental footprint, particularly in industries with a high degree of service delivery such as financial services, public sector and the technology industry itself. The consumption of energy by the technology industry makes it a huge offender for emissions while UK & Ireland fail to make their emissions targets. The amount of energy consumed during an ongoing cost of energy crisis also emphasises the need of making IT greener - and leveraging IT to reduce the climate impact of organisations and their eco-systems.

As we cautiously emerge from beneath the shadow of COVID-19 and return to the workplace our thoughts begin to embrace the many uncertainties that confront us. More especially, how best to quickly restart our organisations in an environment where the rules are yet still mostly undefined, but likely to be very different than before and the expectations of our customers may well have changed substantially. What this pandemic has taught us is that we need to configure our organisations differently. They need to be much more agile, differentiated and yet at the same time inherently more robust. And, we need to accelerate our restart process to claim first-mover advantage in a marketplace that will very likely be much smaller, more selective, more aggressive, and very much more competitive than before. All this speaks of an organisational model that has an inherently flatter structure, distributed leadership, wider spans of individual control, devolved authorities and accountabilities, higher levels of visibility, rapid decision-making capabilities and needs to leverage its key differentiators in the eyes of its customers. Intuitively, this means the business can be continually tuned to operate at maximum effectiveness as a closely knit entity without the historical stove-pipe behaviours, tribes and process encumbrances that have existed before. It also requires a closely aligned, properly integrated people, process and technology infrastructure to help support, enable and drive it. Only through achieving this will the customer experience become truly enhanced!

No tariffs and no quotas - that’s what everyone said when the UK and EU announced the new Trade and Cooperation Agreement in December 2020 – and it is true, up to a point. UK originating goods are tariff free when entering the EU. EU originating goods are tariff fee when entering the UK. But determining the origin of goods is not always straightforward, and no proof is required until 1^st January 2022. What unpleasant surprises are waiting to emerge in the New Year?

On 1^st January 2021 the EU introduced a series of controls on imports of animal products from Great Britain. It is no exaggeration to say that this created chaos, and seven months on, UK food exporters are still struggling to recover. The UK, meanwhile, delayed the introduction of similar controls for most animal products arriving from the EU, but this will soon change. On 1^st October 2021 all products of animal origin entering Great Britain from the EU will require certification and registration. On 1^st January 2022 a further requirement for inspection of arrivals will be introduced. Both of these requirements are likely to dent, or even reverse, the anaemic recovery in food imports from the EU to the UK. What should or can be done to prepare for these critical changes?

On 25^th June companies which have opted to defer their UK import declarations will need to start dealing with the consequences. 25^th June marks the first of a series of dates when the UK will tighten its border controls. Will there be chaos or barely a ripple? What happens at the end of June could give us a window to the future.

The most recent figures from the UK Office for National Statistics[1] made grim reading. Imports from the EU to the UK, having fallen by almost 30% in January, showed only an anaemic recovery of 7% in February. At first glance, it appears that exports from the UK to the EU had fared better, with a good proportion of January’s loss returning in February. Looking under the surface, however, shows that most of this recovery was due to two sectors – machinery and transport equipment (incl. cars) and chemicals (incl. vaccine ingredients). This indicates that the impact of Brexit on trade volumes is likely to be persistent.

Since the 23^rd March 2020, when the UK transitioned overnight into a self-enforced national lockdown in an attempt to curtail the transmission of COVID-19, executives have been almost entirely focused on damage limitation to their people, business infrastructure and trading position. As we now emerge from lockdown, in the absence of a viable vaccine and attempt to manage the further spread of the virus by local, less economically damaging measures, we must focus on other important events looming large on the immediate time horizon. If not handled correctly and with knowledge, insight and experience these events will be as equally damaging to many of our UK businesses as the virus itself.

The level of entrepreneurship in an economy is cyclical, and historically precedes the economic cycle. The post-pandemic recovery of the global economy, nations and value chains will rely on the level of entrepreneurship to increase and lift new and existing organisations and ultimately whole economies. Never before in most people’s working lives has the entrepreneurial spirit been more important for organisations to survive, innovate, explore opportunities and thrive through the down-turn triggered by the pandemic and beyond.

As we return to the workplace and attempt to emerge from beneath the shadow of COVID-19 we will see that, for most organisations around the world, the pandemic has laid waste to the P&L and Balance Sheet to the extent that they now both exhibit significantly more red than black. Undoubtedly, planning for and executing a successful recovery will cost money. So, every function in the organisation will now be under scrutiny. Not least those functions previously classified as “indirects” or “back office” such as finance, legal, human resources and information technology, etc. Because money is tight, and the capital markets are hesitant to lend on reasonable terms in the present uncertain times, all internal costs will become a focus of attention.

Every executive running a busy organisation has, at one time or another, stared through the office window and thought “… if only I were King (or Queen) for a day and could just stop the business merry-go-round for long enough to re-shape and re-position my business it could all be so very different...” Well, probably none of us will ever be a King or a Queen. And, in any case, there is a wise old idiom we should remember which asserts that you should always “be careful what you wish for, lest it come true”. Never has this been truer than in respect of the COVID-19 pandemic. That certainly stopped the business merry-go-round for us all, in no uncertain terms. Having been on forced lock-down for several months now we have all had plenty of time to watch and reflect on the damage it has done to our industries, businesses, suppliers, customers and markets.