Making the digital business dependable.
In 2020, many organisations had to change how they worked before they had time to design the change properly. Customer conversations moved online. Teams worked apart. Processes that depended on being in the same room became much harder to run.
The question for 2021 is which of those changes can become a dependable way of operating. Keeping a business moving through an emergency and making it work well over time require different decisions.
Make work visible without adding surveillance
When people cannot rely on a quick conversation across the office, the work needs enough context to travel without them. A customer request should carry its history, its owner and the next expected action. A decision should be recorded where the next person can find it.
Salesforce's December 2020 agreement to acquire Slack signals the importance of connecting collaboration with business systems. At the start of 2021, that remains an announced transaction. The practical work for a team can begin regardless: decide where requests live and how decisions get back into the customer record.
More messages are not evidence of better collaboration. If people must search several channels to discover whether a customer has been contacted, the process still needs attention.
Repair the temporary fixes
Look at the spreadsheets, shared inboxes and manual transfers introduced to keep things running. Some may be perfectly adequate. Others may now hold essential customer information with no clear owner or dependable backup process.
Pick the most consequential gap. Document how the process actually works, including the exceptions. Give it an owner, agree a response expectation and remove one unnecessary transfer of information.
Give teams a sustainable rhythm
A reliable digital business also needs space to improve. Set a regular review of missed handovers, repeated customer questions and work that gets stuck. Include the people doing the work, and make a small number of decisions that they can see being implemented.
I would judge progress by whether customers get a clear answer and whether employees can finish a task without chasing five colleagues. Those are useful tests in any working arrangement.
The next big thing in 2021 may be turning the changes made under pressure into routines that people can trust.
Context: Salesforce's December 2020 agreement to acquire Slack.
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Annual series edition: 5 January. This edition was prepared or revised on 8 September 2026.
