By The pandemic has taught businesses the importance of being nimble, agile and responsive to changes. Businesses who managed to pivot quickly and adjust to the new normal which was remote work thrived and businesses who could not make the transition suffered tremendously.
Fast forward to today and we still see that trend continue even when the impact of pandemic on businesses is not as severe as it once was. If you are still sticking with a rigid and non flexible approach, your business can not survive and thrive in today’s rapidly evolving business world. Competitors who have effective business continuity management and can respond to changes in consumer behavior, industry and market demand enjoys a clear edge over other businesses.
If you want your business to stay one step ahead of the pack, you must adopt IT agility. How can your business embrace IT agility? That is exactly what we will discuss in this article. In this article, you will learn ways businesses can embrace agility to turbocharge their innovation and stay one step ahead of your competitors.
How To Ramp Up Innovation With IT Agility?
Here are a few ways businesses can use to put their innovation in top gear through IT agility.
- Use Automation To Minimize Complexity
To move faster and respond to changes quicker, the first thing you need to do is to automate mundane and repetitive tasks. This will free up resources and give them time to focus on more value driven activities rather than performing repetitive tasks again and again. By saving the time of your employees, you can give them the breathing space they need to think out of the box and come up with innovative ideas.
You can also use automation to minimize complexity. With automation, you can manage diversified processes from a unified dashboard just like with a cheap dedicated server hosting. This takes the pain out of IT management and lets you perform certain tasks automatically. All this translates into cost and time savings which can be used for other purposes. The simpler your processes and systems are the easier it is for you to manage it and mold it to suit the emerging market and customer demands.
- Find The Sweet Spot Between Flexibility and Control
The biggest obstacles most businesses face when they want to embrace agility are rigid IT requirements. Yes, you don’t want to compromise on agility but you also don’t want to fail at fulfilling those IT requirements. You might be wondering, what’s the solution? Shadow IT. Shadow IT gives you much better control and allows you to enforce IT policies but you also don’t have to compromise on the flexibility side of the equation just like Buy vps in Singapore.
Ditch excessive hierarchies and complex structures as it hampers your ability to be agile. If you try to control each and everything, it can lead to fatigue and also limits your business in more ways than one. You can overcome this by striking the perfect balance between control and flexibility.
- Adopt Decentralization
Most businesses think that they should consolidate the technologies, tools and processes in order to minimize the complexity of their IT system. What they don’t realize is that centralization can sometimes lead to the creation of functional silos, add hurdles in your business processes and prevent them from functioning smoothly. Not only that, it can add to the operational complexity.
We have seen that happen to businesses who have embraced centralization and consolidated their entire tech stack. That is why it is highly advisable to go the decentralization route. It can help you minimize process delays and reduce complexity while bringing technology and shared services closer to each other. This will lead to better integration so you don’t face any friction throughout the project lifecycle.
- Adopt a High-Low Strategy
The way your team responds to the growing complexity, evolution and uncertainty will decide the success and failure of your business. Businesses who adapt quickly and effectively to changing scenarios tend to come out on top. When it comes to IT and digital transformation, you should adopt a high-low strategy, which essentially says that you should focus on few tasks that are high value but are difficult to complete. Once you manage to achieve success in completing those tasks, you can start many low value tasks in parallel. This way, both high and low value tasks are not only prioritized but also functionally focused.
- Start With End Goal In Mind
The workload in IT is so extreme that it can force your IT team to put transformation initiatives on the backburner. If your team is found guilty of this on a few occasions then you can recover but if it becomes a common occurrence, you will be in a deeper hole that is harder to get out of.
That is why you should always start with an end goal in mind. Have a vision and set priorities based on that. Ask yourself where you want to be when the project ends? All this will keep you on the right track. With a clear vision and strategy as well as the end state, you are more likely to achieve success than to taste failure. You will be making huge strides towards your ultimate goal.
- Master The Art of Data Management
Large enterprises usually have a dispersed and complex technology stack with dozens of different tools, technologies and processes being used all at the same time. This is not only bad for agility but also for data management. Since it is harder to extract actionable insights from huge data sets, most data never get used. As a result, you miss out on huge opportunities and fail to make improvements where it matters. That is why it is imperative that you minimize complexity so you can take full advantage of data at your disposal. This will help you make data driven decisions at the right time and drive your business towards success.
- Create A System To Reward and Reinforce
The problem with agile is that most businesses might jump on the hype train but very few can stay on it for long to see the benefits. That is why it is important for businesses to develop a system which not only reinforces changes but also rewards individuals and groups who have played their part in making that happen.
Your objective should be to create a sustainable environment where you can bring iterative improvement and streamline your processes. A cheap dedicated hosting can help you in this regard. You need continuity in your policies in order to achieve sustainable results with agile. The real benefits can only be realized when you can scale agile throughout your organization.
How do you use IT agility to your business advantage? Let us know in the comments section below.
