Quickly and Decisively – How to Become an Adaptive Enterprise

Simon Ellis of IDC emphasizes that achieving digital maturity through a holistic approach enables adaptive enterprises to react quickly and decisively to disruptions, ultimately leading to improved financial performance.

“React quickly and decisively” was the final counsel that Simon Ellis, Group Vice President at IDC, included in his article, The Adaptive Enterprise. Research from his team at IDC suggests that digital maturity – a defining characteristic of adaptive enterprises – is closely correlated with revenue and profit performance. Whether you’re making flooring materials or facilitating a cross-border cold chain, financial health through economic turns is the universal goal. When harmonized with people and processes, the near-infinite scalability of digital resources is a key factor in becoming a financially healthy adaptive enterprise that reacts quickly and decisively in the face of disruption. In a sea of seemingly qualified vendors, how does a company with complex manufacturing and/or supply chain operations act quickly and decisively to find the right partner?

Consistency is Key

Let’s state what might be obvious – if a vendor can’t support a holistic approach to quick and decisive action, their solution might not live up to your potential. Said positively: the right partner can use a holistic approach to quickly unlock hidden potential not only in your systems but also in your people and processes. Let’s break that down.

Acting Quickly – Speed applies to three phases of engagement, whereas most vendors focus on the “daily use” bucket. While the importance of user experience should not be downplayed, the setup and support phases cannot be forgotten. Speed to benefit is increasingly important as the average time between competitive and global disruptions continues to shrink. A solution that can be implemented quickly will allow you to optimize your business faster and is more likely to be designed for your industry. Once the system is in place the SLAs for functional, administrative, technical, and infrastructural support become important. Though a cloud subscription has a higher sticker price than locally hosted maintenance costs, Cloud can deliver better ROI once the internal costs to stay up-to-date and maintain 24/7 uptime are factored in.

Acting Decisively – There’s a difference between an implementation team asking, “how do you want to do this?” and “what are you trying to achieve?”. The former puts the responsibility on your organization, whereas the latter is an alignment with your organization’s goals. Projects stall and potential goes unmet when the open-ended questions are geared toward system configuration rather than business priorities. Decisiveness comes from your solution and implementation partner understanding your business challenges and goals to form a prescriptive path, which is only possible when they’re experienced in your industry.

Acting Holistically – Though digital resources are the most scalable and gain value with use, Simon points out that “digital elements put more pressure on the physical” and therefore must augment them. This is only possible when people and processes are considered alongside systems and technology.

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