The "temporary new normal"
The "temporary new normal"
As Amdocs prepares for a gradual return to the office now that lockdown restrictions are beginning to be lifted in certain countries around the globe, the lessons of how the company coped with the disruption of COVID-19 will be uppermost in mind, said Tamar Rapaport-Dagim, Amdocs’ chief financial and chief operating officer.
In a Barclays Americas fireside chat last week, the Amdocs senior executive said the company had three major focus areas during the crisis: How do we keep our employees safe?
How do we support our customers through maintaining our daily mission-critical operational support for them and fulfilling new projects milestones? How do we ensure the operational excellence of the company’s productivity at such a time?
“I believe we did a good job in all three aspects,” Rapaport-Dagim told chat host Tavy Rosner from Barclays Equity Research. Amdocs, she said, was very proactive in making the decision mid-March to move almost all its global workforce to work from home and it did so “without missing a beat on production or productivity.”
In fact, Amdocs deployed close to 50 go lives in different projects around the world in March and April. Such an accomplishment, Rapaport-Dagim continued, was the result of accelerating the implementation of collaboration tools and methodologies and “the amazing commitment of our employees around the world.”
Labelling the return to work in the office as a return to a “temporary new normal, because we don’t know what the ‘new normal’ looks like,” Rapoport-Dagim said Amdocs’s return to work in the office will follow the same three principles that guided its response to COVID-19.
The Amdocs leader said any return to the office would be conducted gradually, and on a country-by-country basis, depending on each locality’s success in curtailing coronavirus and local public health regulations. This return to the office would also be aligned with Amdocs customers as the company does it together with them.
Looking at the wider picture, Rapoport-Dagim added that Amdocs believes its latest offerings around digital modernization, consumption of media and content at home, and 5G, had proved their relevance during the pandemic and will be even more vital for service providers going forward.