2020 has been a year for the history books. Regardless of what country your organization operates in, the COVID-19 pandemic has likely affected you in profound ways. Even apart from health concerns, stay-at-home orders and other travel or operational restrictions have probably made 2020 look very differently than you thought it would--both in your personal life and in the life of your enterprise.

And while many organizations are counting mere survival as success at a time like this, smart enterprises realize that the unique challenges of this time also serve as opportunities to move into a new way of doing business. While some enterprises have experienced an incredible downturn, others have learned to be even more successful amid this crisis.

Here 3 things that smart enterprises are learning during the global pandemic of 2020. 

1. The success of your organization demands modern online experiences.

This was true long before the global pandemic, but it’s as apparent now as it’s ever been: the success of your organization demands modern online experiences. Chances are that a customer will interface with your brand long before they ever come to a physical location to purchase from you. Depending on your product or service, some will never come to see you in person and will only ever interface with you online. 

And if this was true before the pandemic, it’s even more true now. If you work in B2B, travel restrictions have likely caused you to think creatively about how to meaningfully engage with partners and clients without being able to travel by plane to see them or to hold in-person workshops or conferences. And if you engage directly with end customers, you have likely had to learn how to attract and retain them without having them come to a physical store.

Smart enterprise leaders are considering how they can make every part of their business model adaptable to an entirely digital work, and to do it in such a way that cuts through the noise to deliver real value. This means honing in UX and UI in order to make them frictionless, as well as delightful to use. 

2. Disruptions are opportunities for new innovation.

Living in a world where most people are restricted in their movements around their cities and regions has absolutely decimated certain industries where a physical presence is required, such as entertrainment driven by in-person experiences and businesses built as community third spaces. On the other hand, other industries have exploded in the wake of this crisis, including food and grocery delivery services, online streaming, and video conferencing applications. 

In this moment, there are opportunities to leverage technology to meet new customer demands that have arisen during 2020. And while some of this demand will likely be temporary, the world will never return to exactly how it was before the COVID-19 crisis. 

Many of the new innovations that have become popular during this time will likely become part of the new normal, even once restrictions around the world have been completely lifted. So smart enterprises are considering how they might divert their energies away from some of the things they had been doing before this disruption and how they might instead spend those resources on developing and delivering new digital-based solutions.

3. Being able to pivot your teams quickly is essential.

Depending on where your company operates in the world, your organization likely became a fully remote team overnight. And it remained that way for the better part of a couple months. Such a disruption caused many leaders to re-examine how their teams function. Even after restrictions loosened, many organizations operated differently with regard to how they utilized their staff’s time, whether in office or remotely. 

And far more than simply changing locations, many organizations have actually redeployed their staff to serve entirely different functions that accommodate the current realities of the market and customer demands. Smart organizations think aggressively about how they can leverage the talent on their teams to attack new opportunities, or to hire new positions around those opportunities.

Increase the speed of your innovation with Entando.

When release cycles take months instead of weeks, your business is left unable to deliver modern online experiences. Development bottlenecks slow your ability to make application updates, keeping you from iterating and innovating. And outdated or clunky UX keeps you from winning customers over and retaining them.

So that’s why we created a platform to help you get your ideas to market faster.

Entando is the leading micro frontend platform for building enterprise web apps on Kubernetes. We want to change the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to innovate more quickly.

With Entando, you can quickly create micro frontends using the Entando Component Generator built on JHipster and assemble them onto a single page with the Entando App Builder. Then reuse UI/UX components across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, saving money and increasing development speed while also standardizing your UX and development process. 

With Entando, you also have the ability to scale quickly and effectively with Entando’s custom Kubernetes operator, automating the deployment of scalable, self-healing applications--including progressive web apps. 

Entando is open source with available enterprise support. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our Professional Services team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.