Welcome to a very special edition of Interface Magazine!
The United Kingdom went into full-scale lockdown on March 23, 2020. For many enterprises, the stresses of a locked-down Britain, battling the virus COVID-19, centred around keeping businesses alive amid dramatic shifts in working practices. For others, it was a very different challenge. For the big supermarkets, lockdown represented an enormous logistical spike in operations during a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Supermarkets were literally feeding the nation.
“It’s unprecedented to run a business like ours, a complex business that requires so much day-to-day intense transaction, all remotely,” Sainsbury’s Group CIO, Phil Jordan explains. “We had to maintain normal working conditions to an extent for people who were in stores – the vast majority of the people who work for Sainsbury’s have been instore during the pandemic – with social distancing and various other things we had to do, to keep colleagues and customers safe. And doing all that while everybody else who provides a support service to the stores were not working in the same location. To be fair, we’ve done an incredible job, because we pivoted the whole company to work from home in a couple of weeks, and at no point did any of that ever cause any disruption to the stores.”
We also have exclusive interviews with Constantin Mares, Executive Director of OTP Bank Romania, Sulaiman Abdulla, Manager of the Procurement and Contracts Section at UAE telco regulator TRA and Patrick Kammermann, CIO at EF Education.
Plus, we list 5 ways in which technology will aid the post-Covid recovery and we feature another digital transformation masterclass with Paul J. Bailo.
Enjoy the issue!
