Global Pandemic: Business Model Impact on Enterprises reTHINK, reIMAGINE, reINVENT Businesses Sandeep Gopisetty IBM Research - Almaden San Jose, CA Sandeep.Gopisetty@us.ibm.com Abstract— The COVID-19 outbreak is a sharp reminder that pandemics, like other rarely occurring catastrophes, have happened in the past and will continue to happen in the future. Even if we cannot prevent dangerous catastrophes, businesses need to manage risks, reduce costs, improve efficiency while digitizing products and offerings, streamlining processes to retain existing customers. As industry leaders around the globe are driving their teams forward from their attics, basements and spare rooms, the need for business continuity is vital more than ever. It is important for Enterprises to have the right tools, technology and skills to deal with this crisis. One can make use of expert advice through consulting services to understand the level of preparedness and to respond quickly with what needs to be done. It is time to quickly move beyond manual, people-dependent processes and switch to automation and orchestration to reduce the complexity. Our solution takes advantage of modeling in over 80 different types of industries and addresses both industry standard as well as custom priorities to help enterprises focus on the right investment to improve the performance of their business components. Keywords- Global Pandemic, Business models, Enterprises, Human-in-the-loop, Cognitive Solutions, Semantic Search, Domain Learning Assistant, Data Experience. I. INTRODUCTION A global pandemic such as COVID-19 creates unplanned stress test for business. Government-mandated restrictions, sudden changes to the way of working impact an organization’s goals on performance, efficiency and reliability. The focus on containment of the pandemic and unavailability of staff will leave businesses vulnerable. In this environment, enterprises need a sharp focus on the activities that provide real advantage and profit to provide full value to their key stakeholder groups of customers, employees and shareholders. It’s imperative that enterprises need innovative approach to respond to the epidemic including enablement of workforce enablement, communication, collaboration, and business transformation. Component Business Models (CBM) are business components that are identified and proposed as a standard for individual segments of the most common industries. Business components help enterprises rethink the leverage they can achieve with the assets and capabilities internally while they can additionally source specialized capabilities. CBM is a technique to model and analyze an enterprise. It is a logical representation or map of business components and can be used to analyze the alignment of enterprise strategy with the organization's capabilities and investments, identify redundant or overlapping business capabilities, analyze sourcing options for the different components, prioritizing transformation options and can be used to create a unified roadmap after mergers or acquisitions. The pandemic has put the traditional business models in a state of flux. Do firms digitally reinvent their businesses, or try to hang on as discrete parts of their organizations or be ravaged by nimbler, technologically superior upstarts from outside their core industry? Digital reinvention is about reimagining all key elements of your business strategy, operations, and technology, with a central focus on creating improved customer experiences. It calls for embracing technological change and disruption and viewing an enterprise as a collaborative unit that is part of a wide ecosystem. In the post pandemic world, firms need to achieve the benefits of scale, security, flexibility, efficiency while retaining existing customers and embracing cloud and digitization of products and services. In this environment, enterprises need a sharp focus on the activities that provide real advantage and profit to provide full value to their key stakeholder groups of customers, employees and shareholders. Business processes have governed intra and inter-enterprise operational modeling for decades and have helped in business transformation efforts. It has been demonstrated in the past that significant outsourcing and supply chain implementation have helped companies foster innovation while also providing substantial savings. As the implications of the global connectivity platform ripple out through the marketplace, firms face a fundamental need for specialization on two parallel tracks: external and internal. Firms can use the concept of the CBM to make the transformation to internal and external specialization a practical reality. CBM allows firms to evaluate the goals and strategy of the entire enterprise to take simultaneous advantage of internal and external specialization. Without increasing complexity, the model allows an organization to expand and evolve while reducing risk, driving business 114 2020 IEEE Second International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI) © IEEE 2021. This article is free to access and download, along with rights for full text and data mining, re-use and analysis. DOI 10.1109/CogMI50398.2020.00024 2020 IEEE Second International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI) | 978-1-7281-4144-2/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/COGMI50398.2020.00024