Many enterprises recognize that digital transformation is not just a tool for maintaining competitive positioning in the market; instead, it has become a necessary objective for survival. Customers can easily transition to a competitor that makes their experience more convenient, cheaper, or enjoyable, so any enterprise that doesn’t prioritize these elements will become obsolete. Even in their awareness of this fact, many enterprises aren’t giving business agility the focus it demands.
The ability to quickly put into place those steps that will help businesses achieve their objectives is more critical than ever. Enterprises can no longer put plans into place that take months or years to achieve; there must be quick adoption of strategies with the driving technology.
How to Prioritize Business Agility: The practical measures that equip an enterprise for quickly adapting to new business objectives can take many shapes. For instance, if a company is adopting new cloud solutions to improve the customer experience, they may also need to invest in a network upgrade that allows for improved bandwidth availability and quick on-ramping of new cloud apps.
When an enterprise discovers the potential that a fleet of new sensors can have on their manufacturing efficiency, they need the corresponding security policies to be updated quickly to protect data and systems from the additional vulnerability introduced by the devices.
Promoting business agility often comes in “softer” forms, as well. For instance, many technology advances are rejected in the enterprise simply because of the lack of buy-in across the organization. If you are rolling out a new voice over internet protocol (VoIP) solution, include stakeholders from a variety of departments and invest in the necessary training to ensure quick and seamless adoption of the new technology.
What Happens When Business Agility Isn’t Embraced: If agility is not a priority for the organization, one of two things will happen. The company will become obsolete, or the executives managing change will be replaced. In fact, a study by Willis Towers Watson noted that 28% of CEOs released from their responsibilities were fired because they mismanaged change.
One of the key ways in which business agility is achieved is through the alignment of IT leaders with executives and line-of-business managers. IT professionals can help executives shape realistic expectations for new technology, as well as ensure the underlying infrastructure is equipped for timely adoption of new solutions.
Business agility is critical for survival in the current market. For more information and practical solutions for promoting agility, contact us at Enterprise Visions. We can help you put the processes and tools in place to promote agility in a fast-changing environment.