Accelerating Change Through Crisis
Today we are beginning to emerge from a pandemic which has indelibly impacted the business world. While there are many different impacts of this global crisis, in it lie opportunities to drive business forward — to accelerate. The world of technology and business is changing, and that rate of change has only increased due to COVID-19. When crises occur business can retrench or use them as an opportunity to move forward. While different approaches are appropriate for different industries, at Wiley, as in many industries, we saw the opportunity to accelerate. Internally, the crisis allowed us to accelerate the delivery of many projects to enable better remote collaboration for our workforce. Externally, we saw our customers moving rapidly in the direction we had been striving towards for many years. We saw opportunities for innovation to enable our users as well for long-lasting business transformation. This paper looks at the impact of COVID-19 on Wiley along with the short and long-term responses and the opportunities they each provide. It looks at the way we can, not just survive in the face of crisis, but use crises such as COVID-19 to evolve our business. While the crisis presented many challenges, it also presented many opportunities to accelerate.
Wiley was historically known as a publishing company but, now more than ever, we are a tech-enabled research and education company. Wiley’s success has long been defined by our ability to listen to the world and adapt in response. Today, we are faced with global crises — the pandemic and a divided country battling with social injustice and inequality. Against this backdrop, what Wiley does — research and education — is more important than ever. And for Wiley, the only path forward, as always, is to keep evolving in pursuit of our mission to help the world heal, recover, rebuild and thrive.
Well before the COVID crisis even hit, Brian Napack, Wiley CEO, Brian Napack, said “We are not in a single market that is not going through major disruption,” and he is right. Everything from research to education to publishing. And those changes are only accelerated by the crisis we face today. Wiley is a company that has been around for over 200 years and we have only been around that long because of our ability to continue to transform. The fact that nearly 80% of Wiley’s revenue is generated from digital products and tech-enabled services, and this continues to rise, is a testament to the transformation from staid publisher to digital disruptor.
COVID-19 has accelerated our already changing world and the fundamental trends that have been driving change in our markets for the past few years. These trends include the need to get more peer-reviewed research to market faster, the need to move education online and make it more affordable, and the need to help people rapidly gain the skills they need to succeed in the jobs of tomorrow.
COVID-19 has impacted different markets in different ways. What almost all mid to large sized enterprises had in common was the need to make rapid adjustments to enable workforces to continue to do their jobs during a global pandemic. For Wiley’s internal IT, this shift was amazingly rapid and relatively seamless given the scope of the change. What we saw at Wiley was that the provisions we had put in place to enable hundreds of remote workers combined with planning around redundancy and resilience enabled us to scale to thousands.
On March 13, 2021, we left the office thinking we would be at work on Monday — and on Saturday, March 14, we decided we would not. As users moved to work from home, we saw a significant spike in requests as users struggled to get systems configured at home and get connected to the resources they needed. We saw a spike in requests regarding connectivity requirements especially related to accessing sensitive information and applications via VPN. We also saw an increase in requests for collaboration and productivity tools.
In addition, the start of the pandemic brought with it an increase in cybersecurity threats. The start of the pandemic saw a significant uptick in phishing and spear phishing. Many attackers used fear and chaos to find new social engineering attacks such as COVID-19 related tax scams which pretended to offer tax relief in order to capture user credentials. To protect against the increased cybersecurity threats, we added additional resources to our Security Operations Center. Ultimately, we were able to move over 7,000 employees to work from home in a matter of days with almost no impact. Not only that, this crisis opened up an opportunity for acceleration on multiple fronts.
In order to support our newly oriented work-from-home workforce our internal IT took several steps. In anticipation of increased needs for remote user support, we shifted resources to staff up our Service Desk adding additional people to all shifts. We immediately re-allocated on-site support technicians to our support call center expanding our calling system to include these team members as well. On the security front, we took similar actions increasing staffing levels in our Security Operations Center to ensure that our users and our customers remained safe during this time of change.
In addition, we needed to adapt our technologies and leverage existing technologies in new ways. In order to ensure all users had access to network resources, we immediately moved to increase network bandwidth. Fortunately, the networking teams had the forethought to have significant additional bandwidth available but we wanted to ensure this was never an issue for our users so we went the additional step of allocating more.
We also saw a significant increase in the usage of our collaboration tools. Teams is our chat platform and we saw a dramatic increase when we shifted to work from home. Skype saw a similar boost in usage immediately after shifting to work from home driving global communications to all our resources and offering community building outside of the office. Our teams went beyond enabling these tools to provide an opportunity for more because we went beyond that initial increase and used this as an opportunity to deprecate Skype to get everyone on the same chat communications platform. Team usage saw a dramatic increase in usage after moving to a work-from-home environment and again after the deprecation of Skype. Overall, we saw growth of over 55% on our Teams platform.
The pandemic helped Wiley to accelerate projects which had been in progress for some time. We were able to complete projects in two weeks that had been in progress for two years. A great example of this was around our efforts to do remote imaging of laptops. Before COVID-19, new users had laptops shipped to their regional offices where technicians manually configured them with the standard Wiley image. A project had been underway for quite some time to automate this process, but it was progressing slowly. The pandemic made this a priority and in a matter of weeks the project was completed. New laptops are now shipped directly to new hires and are automatically updated with the Wiley image when users first power them on. This project has reduced the time to configure a new device from 4 hours to just twenty minutes with no manual intervention necessary. Overall this opportunity to accelerate has saved thousands of hours and significantly improved user satisfaction.
Not only did the pandemic accelerate change at Wiley, COVID-19 also accelerated changes for our internal users and our customers. One of the major and most obvious shifts in user behavior was the shift in the way end users accessed the Service Desk. At Wiley, we provide a high-touch customer approach to End User Services with tech bards and onsite support staff. We had, for some time, been trying to get users to use less expensive support methods of self-service, phone, and chat support but users had been slow to make this shift. In one swoop the pandemic made onsite support a thing of the past and forced users to move to new methods of contact which we had been urging them towards for years.
We saw similar shifts in behavior of our customers. As a technology-focused business, we have been developing amazing education technology products to enable users to learn online but universities have been slow to adopt. The pandemic forced this transition for many educational institutions pushing them to embrace new ways of learning. Pushing learners use the tools and technologies which we have been developing for years. In these ways, the pandemic significantly accelerated trends that had been in progress for years.
When we look at the broader impact of the pandemic on business we can see that the impact has varied dramatically. The market reaction at the start of the pandemic provides another view into the impact by industry. From tremendous growth for companies that enable collaboration to significant downturns for industries such as travel. Zoom saw tremendous growth, growing by 30x growing from 10 million daily meeting participants in December to over 300 million in April. Wiley is a diverse business and has been impacted in many different ways. We are fortunate that the bulk of the impact has been largely favorable. We have seen significant upswings in our online education products as students around the world transitioned to remote learning. Even businesses that were based in onsite corporate training have adapted rapidly and been able to pivot to online training options.
The shift has also been a reminder that we are in the fortunate position to do just about everything we do from home. Unlike many service industries, most of what we do in the technology field can be done from home using modern collaboration tools. At Wiley, with the exception of book printing and distribution, most of what we do is now digital and translates easily to the remote world.
While the impact to business of the pandemic varied significantly based on industry, I would posit that there is opportunity in this crisis for all businesses — even if that opportunity is to drive cost efficiency across business. A boutique fitness business rapidly shifted all their classes virtual in the weeks following the pandemic. They invested heavily in making this an excellent experience for all their members. Not only that, but they dropped all membership fees. While revenue took a nose-dive they emerged from the pandemic with loyalty from their users unrivaled by any other competitor in their space. They were also able to introduce a whole new line of business offering their unique brand of dance cardio to users around the world.
There’s an old adage that you should “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and that has never been more pertinent than today. At Wiley, we used this opportunity to radically change old ways of doing business. We used the opportunity to smash down assumptions and barriers and assumptions that had been in place for many years. During traditional ups and downs of the economy, it can take years to radically shift how you are doing business. We often see transformations like the move to agile or DevOps take place over years for mid and large size enterprises. During the pandemic, we saw these radical shifts taking place in a matter of weeks which previously had taken years. The pandemic also accelerated the shift in perspective on the very role that technology plays within an organization. There has for some time been an understanding that the business needs technology but more and more there is a recognition that technology is the business or, at very least, the business and technology are inseparable.
This is hard — I do not want to imply otherwise or to make little of the fact that people are suffering. There is personal suffering here. Globally it is estimated that over 3.5 million people have lost their lives due to COVID and this number is only continuing to climb. There are business challenges and, even for businesses that are not adversely impacted, running a business during a pandemic presents challenges previously unimagined. There is not a “one size fits all” approach — different strategies depending on your business and the impact to your market. But there are invariably opportunities and I encourage you to find the opportunity.
While I do not have insight into the future, what I can tell you is that never before has technology been more important. Never has operations and execution been more important and never has digital disruption been more relevant than today. As we emerge from the crisis of today, we must take with us the realization that the world is transforming, and we must too. Now, more than ever, we are all technology companies. Do not wait for a “return to normal” find new opportunities, accelerate, and use those to re-envision your business. Stop waiting, embrace constant change. There is not a “back to normal” there is just the next normal, and the next one after that, and the next one after that. If you are waiting for a return to normal you may be waiting while you go out of business. Because, while we may never get back to normal, there is tremendous opportunity in the next change, and it is up to you to take advantage of it.
