3 minute read
Antonio Peñalver
COVID19 AS ACCELERATOR TOWARD DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Digital Transformation had a hand on the helm for businesses in different sectors, but COVID19 pandemic stepped on the accelerator. Companies such as Sopra Steria are creating resources to face a gradual return to regular activities
Written by
Mateo Rafael Tablado
It is common knowledge that almost everyone has had to adapt to the pandemic’s consequences as soon as COVID19 practically took over the planet: aside from those considered as essential activities, home office stopped being an exception to become a standard, ditto for homeschooling at every level, eating out turned into a venture onto the outdoors without leaving the yard, and online retail also became common practice. And now, the same digital transformation we had been experiencing in recent years demands the development of necessary resources to gradually return to spaces inhabited before the pandemic hit. According to an EFE agency interview with Antonio Peñalver, CEO for Sopra Steria in Spain, digital transformation in most sectors in the Iberian country has taken steps forward, finding companies in a spot in which they had pictured themselves to arrive four or five years from now. “There are currently plenty of sectors that just cannot operate without this tech transformation. We’ve arrived at a point that would’ve taken us years to get to in regular conditions. What COVID has done is accelerate in record time the trends that were already latent in our society,” the Sopra Steria executive declared.
RECOVERING PUBLIC SPACES
Sopra Steria is a multinational enterprise in Europe which provides ICT, consultancy and digital solutions to different sectors. With the purpose of creating innovative solutions to counteract COVID and its consequences, the company organized a virtual hackathon among employees in their Spain locations; the AFORUM app resulted from this event,
it monitors private and public spaces by connecting to camera networks, determining a place’s occupancy to let us know if it’s safe or if the amount of people increases the risk of infection, keeping space inhabitants anonymous. Peñalver estimates AFORUM will become available before 2020 comes to an end. “We are developing this app to make it available to organizations that may consider it useful. We are in the final stage of development,” Peñalver added. AFORUM’s possible success depends upon infrastructure matters according to each place the app will
- Antonio Peñalver, CEO for Sopra Steria Spain
become available at, being poised as an ideal resource for smart cities, where there’s access to wide networks of public cameras, which are almost non-existent in marginalized communities in underdeveloped countries.
TAKE A SEAT… AND SOME DISTANCE
Workplaces were not exempt of being subject to a worthy resource which would ease return to offices once a recuperation period from the pandemic starts, since Sopra Steria also developed the “Take a Seat” app, designed to efficiently facilitate return to offices by managing cubicle availability in a way that enough space stands between employees to avoid infections. “This app eases the return to office space in a safe way. It is working for us and some of our clients are interested in it,” said the CEO of Sopra Steria Spain, who is in charge of more than 4,000 employees to whom “Take a Seat” is already available. Even if “Take a Seat” is currently an exclusive app for the Sopra Steria community, it is possible it becomes adapted to other sectors to improve
their use of office space.
Peñalver also pointed out that some of the sectors served by the multinational company, such as finance, banks, and insurance -among others- aren’t newbies to Digital Transformation and have already invested in this process. Another app developed by the firm during the pandemic is a private e-prescription for the local Professional Association of Pharmacists, created last April.
