Why Increasing Business Agility Matters Now?

Business agility refers to the speed at which an organization can adapt to an unexpected or accelerated change. However, this should not be confused with agile practice in the software development realm.

Gartner defines business agility as:

The ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change.

This type of environmental change usually refers to the following three areas:

• Market dynamics and volatility
• Regulations and policies
• Data and information

Unforeseen changes in any of these areas necessitate an immediate organizational response.

A good example of this is in the finance industry, where Covid-19 has completely disrupted normal market dynamics. As a result, banks and financial institutions have been forced to launch several new products and services in order to service both new and existing customers. Take loans for instance, where within a specific product range, credit scoring is entirely distinct from pre-COVID-19 standards. Another good example is the Australian energy and utility industry, where product offerings to consumers is regulated. Now energy suppliers and providers are no longer permitted to offer their entire portfolios of products to customers. Instead, product offerings are filtered out based on the consumer’s state of residence.

As is evident from these examples, organizations must be prepared to deal with change on a constant basis. Any such change may have a ripple effect that ultimately impacts a company’s ability to provide their product or service to a customer in a routine manner.

In other words, any change may impact not just product management, but possibly the entire value chain, including processes, application and information systems, as well as teams who are impacted by both internal and external policies, as well as market dynamics and regulations. As such, the entire organization may be forced to operate in a different manner. How people make decisions and perform their everyday activities and tasks may be impacted.

The Need to Improve Business Agility

Given the uncertainty of the current business environment, organizations need to focus on ways to respond even more rapidly to unforeseen change. This is particularly true in day-to-day operational areas, where critical efficiencies surrounding core areas like products and services require constant attention. This is where business agility really comes into play.

While Decision Management Suite (DMS) and Business Rules Management System (BRMS) enable companies to adjust product and service offerings to some degree, new data and information must be utilized in order to handle dynamic changes to conditions, circumstances, and other criteria. Here there is a necessity to use orchestration technologies to affect integration with new systems, processes, and data sources. In so doing, the essential tasks must be carried out in an agile fashion in order to realize crucial changes in processes and information systems.

End-to-End Decision Automation is Vital to Improving Business Agility

End-to-end decision automation employs rule-driven or analytical and data-driven techniques that have a positive impact on business agility. This contrasts with those solutions that do not consider organizations as a whole and therefore only address part of the overall challenge. To be truly agile, companies must deploy solutions that consider the cascading impact of any pre- and post-dependencies that need to be in place. This way, a business can ensure that the necessary context for any new products or services is fully considered. This is what we refer to as the full-decision cycle, and it is designed to realize optimal business agility.

Find out more: https://www.flexrule.com/archives/business-agility