I’m starting to hear questions like: “What comes next?” “Do things go back to the way they were?” “Are some of the changes wrought by the pandemic here to stay?” I think we all know part of the answer: there is no going (all the way) back. In the analog world, sure, we need some things to revert to bounce back. We need to revitalize retail, tourism and hospitality to get our economies moving again.

Companies have had only mixed results in their decades-long quest to make better decisions by harnessing enterprise data. But as a new generation of technologies make it easier than ever to unlock the value of business information, change is coming. We’ve already reaped gains at Hitachi Vantara, where I run a global IT team that supports 11,000 employees and helps more than 10,000 customers rapidly scale digital businesses.

Automation will fail to achieve most of its potential if treated as a specialty, single-function tool applied only to accelerate narrow parts of business processes. In most industries, financial services included, automation done properly is a journey that delivers a steady stream of benefits resulting from building a broader and increasingly powerful multilayered stack of automated processes and analytics.

When digital disruption first hit the finance and investment markets, it seemed to signal the death knell for the traditional banks and financial institutions. For a time, it looked as though the best-known brands were doomed to become utilities: only good for basic financial transactions, weighed down by legacy processes and technologies, and viewed as little more than digital dinosaurs.