For UK companies as a whole, including those relying on the expertise of IT service providers, the ‘events’ of 2020 fit both these criteria – Brexit, despite being confirmed on January 31st, is still a largely unknown quantity in terms of the impact it’s going to have, while COVID-19 went from being a footnote tacked onto the end of news bulletins at the beginning of the year to dominating the entire globe by mid-March.
In both cases, but with particular regard to COVID-19, the comfortable assumptions upon which more than half a century of offshoring services was based were swept away in a matter of weeks or even days. Sometimes, as when lockdown was imposed on more then 1.3 billion people across India, the entire model upon which service provision has been based for years was up-ended in a matter of hours, providing a sharply distilled foretaste of the impact which Brexit – deal or no deal, to coin a phrase – is likely to have in 2021.
