Aim for agility
In a recent article, Business 2 Community suggested increased agility is what all enterprises should aim for.
Improving agility enables an enterprise to make optimisations across their entire business. This includes internal processes and workflows which would benefit from increased adaptability and resilience to change. Becoming more agile lets companies adjust and iterate on their processes more rapidly, reducing the time taken to analyse an under-performing strategy or deploy a follow-up to a successful one.
READ NEXT: UPS invests in tech to streamline its network operations
Agility also presents new opportunities for the customer experience. An agile enterprise is typically better-placed to respond to market developments and shifts in customer demand. This enables the business to respond more quickly to the actions of competitors or popular trends amongst consumers.
A business which hasn’t digitally transformed could lack the insights necessary to make these proactive responses. The resulting revenue loss may lead a firm’s executives to seek a new business strategy more appropriate to the current operating climate. However, without the data available to agile competitors, the firm’s ability to effectively re-integrate with the market could be limited.
Individualised approach
Digital transformation presents a multitude of new opportunities for firms which succeed with their strategy. With so many possibilities available, businesses could be overwhelmed or develop plans which prove to be too ambitious to implement.
When aiming for agility, firms should consider how the technologies available to them align with their overall goal. These might include cloud services to improve collaboration, business intelligence suites to mine insights from customer data or the automation of internal processes that are inefficient and prone to bottlenecks.
READ NEXT: Intel is working on smart glasses you could actually wear
Most commonly, some combination of all three technologies will be required. Additional tech, such as IoT, analytics and AI, can then be layered on top to transform the customer experience and expose important data collected from the enterprise’s digital foundations.
Committing to digital transformation should be made in the context of simplifying the business and making it more agile. Introducing new technologies because they’re popular in industry is unlikely to make for a successful digital transition. Firms should be assessing how each system can improve their agility, before making it the keystone of a digital transformation plan.
