Impact of COVID-19 Contagion on Digital Transformation and Economy

Abstract

The novel COVID-19 compelled an unannounced and indefinite holiday in the world with a ripple effect of the global economy downturn. As a result, businesses all over the world have been forced to devise business strategies with minimal negative impact from COVID-19. Since there is no timeline as to when the COVID-19 will end, this paper seeks to empirically examine the COVID-19 impact on the traditional economy vis-a-vis digital transformation paradigm shift in the economy ecosystem leveraging on digital channels. Digital transformation can only be implemented based on the availability of digital channels with developed countries having advantage of readily available infrastructures to accelerate the implementation of digital businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic as compared to growing economies. To this end, two surveys were conducted to ascertain COVID-19 effect on the traditional economy as well as the paradigm shift to digital transformation. The first was the qualitative survey which was analyzed based on Key Research Questions which were transcribed and analyzed from focus group discussion. The second survey establishes the fact gotten from the quantitative survey from Survey Monkey platform. The ggplot2 package in RStudio platform was used for the data visualization using R programming Language enabling the data analysis for a technical evaluation.