Grandmother stories that are DX successes

Here is a true story about digital transformation at an individual level. I’ve shared this story once before to a few members of the industry, and have noticed more tranformation happening around me as well.

Before the lockdown, directions to work-from-home and all that, I was what you could call a remote worker, connecting to the World Wide Web from anywhere that offered a WiFi service. My tools of choice were portable machines that hovered around the 1kg weight-class. Ultra light form factors come at premium prices, so I opted to sacrifice  processor speed and RAM memory.

And all this was still fine. An Intel i5 and 4GB RAM sufficed. In 2016, this configuration wasn’t lagging too far behind high-end specs.

And because my work mostly required light surfing, lots of word processing and email, this configuration was fine for me. My desktop at home, if you can call it that, is a Lenovo tiny PC with a Celeron processor, and it pains me to say this, only 4GB of RAM.

When the lockdown occurred and Zoom meetings slowly started to replace face-to-face meetings, this Celeron machine was the first to creak and groan under the massive computing and memory requirements of video conferencing. It would unceremoniously come to a grinding halt at times, while with my HP Envy machine, I would be kicked off Zoom meetings for reasons I could not pin point.

Was it my Internet service? Did I not have enough RAM and/or processor power? Was it the way Zoom routed their traffic that made it disadvantageous for Zoom-ers in the Puchong area?

And with a major webinar slated to happen in another week, I made the drastic decision to purchase a desktop during lockdown. How does one pull this off, you may ask.

The official Lenovo store would deliver in 3 to 5 business days for some computer models. But none of these models were what I was looking for.

Eventually I tried the reseller route, discovering that the nearest reseller was still 10km away from me. I visited their website, picked out the computer I wanted, and called the mobile number on the website.  No one was at their store to answer the store’s phone. Yes, the physical store is closed, but the business was still operating, devising workarounds while still adhering to SOPs.

In less than 12 hours, I’d made my payment online, shared proof of payment via Whatsapp, and got ready to receive my new machine which came via Grab Delivery.

And thus, was my dramatic and personal digital transformation which was brought about by my needing to continue doing my job, albeit in different and more digital ways ie. online webinars and online meetings.

If you have caught up with your colleagues and peers in the industry, you may hear of similar digital transformations.

You may discover like I have, that no one, and I mean absolutely no one is left untouched by this.

I know a 76 year old grandmom who now watches YouTube to learn new recipes. Six months ago, she didn’t even know how to share pictures she took with her phone. Now, she and her siblings are on a Whatsapp chat group and share songs with each other, digitally.

Who underwent the bigger transformation? Myself, or the grandmother?

IT BYTES BACK! Says: What the heck happened? A deadly virus gripped the whole world and forced all of us to change and adapt how we do things. Essentially, we got creative in our problem-solving, too! I can’t wait to see what further transformation technology will bring. Perhaps I will have more grandmother stories to share.