“Never let a good crisis go to waste.” – Attributed to Winston Churchill

That’s an attention-getting line whether Churchill actually ever said it or not, because it’s a little jarring to see the words “good” and “crisis” side by side. And there seems to be very little good in the central crisis of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken far too many lives and rocked the economy.

But history shows that in any crisis there is opportunity. In the broadest strokes, the pandemic has fueled demand for some IT services as unprepared companies scrambled to establish accessible and secure work-from-home (WFH) systems. And that remote workforce has refocused the spotlight on cybersecurity, presenting a wide new range of security exposures … and opportunity for those who provide the solutions.

Nevertheless, these have been challenging time for nearly everyone in the tech industry and elsewhere, and we may be too busy bailing out the boat to see the opportunities on the horizon. There has been plenty of general business advice circulating – some of it very good – on how to make the most of the lockdown. One post we especially enjoyed recommends quick “Zoom scrums” with team members (15 minutes or less) and offers this great advice: “Don’t get it perfect, get it done.”

But more specific opportunities await the tech professional, based on what we’ve heard from our Technology Executive Peer Advisory Network (TEPAN) community members. These are CIOs and other tech leaders sharing specific steps they’ve taken to reduce spending, improve operations or both since the pandemic began. A sampling:

  • Initiate new RFP processes and review relationships with primary vendors, resulting in improved pricing during a very competitive and cost-conscious time. More on this in a moment.
  • Review recurring charges/subscriptions on credit cards and eliminate those that are no longer needed. One member went to the extreme of turning off credit cards completely to identify hidden monthly fees. There were some unexpected service outages, but the savings were worth the inconvenience.
  • Implement new solutions quickly even if they have shortcomings (in keeping with the “don’t get it perfect …” advice above).
  • Get more involved in the boardroom. Executive leadership relies on IT now more than ever, and this is the time to ask questions and make suggestions.
  • Request frank feedback from employees. This is invaluable information, and the consensus seems to be that in the current environment team members are more willing than usual to say what’s really on their minds.
  • Making that frank feedback a two-way street. Physically separated employees want and need to know how the business is doing in the midst of crisis. Some members have made it a point to establish new channels of communication for this purpose. In a recent post on CIO.com, one executive notes, “Your employees are more worried than you are because they don’t have access to the planning information, which could cause serious morale and production problems. At these high-level meetings, we forget that we know what we know, but they don’t know what we know so you can’t communicate often enough.”

That first bullet point bears more examination, because TEPAN members have approached their vendor relationships in a variety of ways. One informed key vendors very early on that invoices would not be paid on time. Nearly all were appreciative of the advance warning, no one terminated services and several offered a short-term reduction in rates.

Another panelist used the opportunity to renegotiate outstanding vendor balances. The vast majority forgave at least part of the balance and agreed on a more favorable payment schedule.

And others used the moment as an opportunity to do some virtual spring cleaning, terminating relationships with vendors that either were not favorable or were redundant.

So for tech professionals, the crux of the crisis-born opportunities have been in reassessing, adjusting and evaluating vendor relationships, but most have recognized the need for enterprise-wide changes in communication as well.

Maybe Churchill really delivered those words and maybe he didn’t, but the quote resonates today either way, as does this from Albert Einstein: “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”