Like most rising workplace trends, resilience through organizational construct and behaviour has accelerated and is fast becoming part of the standard criteria for a successful future-proofed business.
Yet the definition of business resilience has changed considerably over the years, and gaining it can feel like a difficult upheaval, especially for businesses that have been operating in a more traditional style. It used to be that being resilient meant scale, having enough resources to weather a storm and come out the other side being able to grow.
Now the most resilient businesses are those that are agile and can pivot around unforeseen circumstances at pace – which is a painful place to be for businesses built for scale and scope.
However, the pandemic has proven that businesses can adapt quickly to big changes. A recent International Data Corporation (IDC) survey found that 75% of organizations are adjusting their IT road maps to reduce the costs of current systems, enable easy execution, and create operational efficiencies in financial reporting, project management, and employee experience.
The starting point
The sudden shift to remote work across most industries since COVID-19 spotlighted the inadequacies of various areas. Challenges in building resilience into businesses include workflow and process complexity, security and legacy technology.
Workflow and process complexity is the bane of many organizations. That complexity makes resilience a challenge – the more elements in the workflow, the more things that can potentially go wrong, and if it goes wrong enough, the whole process could be derailed. Likewise, complexity is the bane of security in general and CISOs in particular.
For example, a lot of businesses have disparate IT systems that have grown organically over the years and require a lot of love and care to extract value. The first step to becoming resilient is to therefore address how time spent on these systems can be reduced and where employees’ efforts can be refocused to gain continuous incremental value – a vital component of resilience.
The pandemic has changed employees’ expectations in terms of the way they want to work while staying productive and keeping their work data secure as well. Digital transformation will be at the core of building resiliency, by reimagining the traditional way of working and staying nimble to focus on employees’ productivity and their well-being.
Winning with an agile culture
The way teams operate also needs to change in a lot of businesses for them to achieve effective resilience. This is due to the increased agility that’s needed to make changes and decisions quickly.
Agility isn’t just about digital platforms in the cloud – it’s about the employees and the corporate culture in which they are expected to perform, as well as the ability of leadership to encourage their transformation.
For example, if your employees are going to work in smaller teams, capable of independently making their own decisions, then the right environment needs to be created to make that effective. Businesses will also need to focus on ensuring there’s good accessibility to data to make these decisions at the edge, so teams work on insights, instead of guesswork.
Untapped potential in both legacy and cloud-based data can unlock new sources of revenue, new ways of engaging customers, and new opportunities to extract greater value from existing business and technology investments.
That translates, in short, to gaining a competitive advantage in a disrupted market.
A team to out-run Change
To go from a competitor to a market leader in today’s fast-changing world, here are some tips to help business leaders disrupt and stay resilient:
- Think outside of their industries, and switch to the concept of “Digital Arenas”. This means interacting out of one’s immediate industry sector: date movement, turning knowledge into insights, and creating new value by combining services with closely aligned players.
Evolving their existing business, while innovating and scaling new applications and digital services that set them apart. - Taking on a holistic approach to move faster and empower people, beyond just infrastructure and applications-based transformation. For example, a more seamless customer experience can incorporate smart applications, technology and data, while keeping the service operating models, culture, and business processes in scope.
In general, most businesses today will already have many of the components necessary to be resilient. It’s more a case of making the right technological and human-centric tweaks to release it. And by doing this, businesses – no matter how big or small – will truly be able to manoeuvre the challenges of unforeseen circumstances.
