Traditional business models have relied on monthly, quarterly, or yearly planning to set strategic goals and define the next steps. Today, we live in a world where technology continues evolving, and customer expectations keep changing along with the market.
Gone are the days of five-year plans. The pace of disruption has reached an intensity such that any business model today could be unviable in five years.
An agile business plan is the key to success. You must be able to pivot quickly and make changes on the fly to stay ahead of the competition. One way to achieve this agility is through systems integration. Integrated systems bring together the data you need to make informed business decisions and find cut-through in the market.
What is business agility?
Business agility is your organisational capability to alter or adopt new business models and sharpen your competitive advantage. It is the capacity to absorb disruption and pivot seamlessly and successfully.
Robust business agility requires both outside-in and inside-out moves; systems integration helps scale both. Outside-in agility includes adapting quickly to market changes and responding rapidly to changing customer needs. Internal agility revolves around leading change cost-effectively and productively, without compromising customer outcomes or quality.
There are many benefits to achieving an agile business, including:
- Customer satisfaction: Business agility allows you to respond much faster to customer expectations with products and services that align with market changes. When you do so, customer satisfaction increases
- Employee engagement: Business agility can boost employee engagement by fostering an environment that welcomes input from all levels of the organisation and enables them to connect with the organisation’s goals.
- Time-to-market: In a rapidly changing marketplace, the ability to quickly adapt and respond to customer needs is critical to success. Business agility provides the framework and flexibility needed to shorten time-to-market. In addition, agile businesses can often get products and services to market faster than their competitors, giving them a first-mover advantage.
- Cost efficiencies: These factors can lead to increased profits and lower costs. By responding quickly to changes in the marketplace, businesses can avoid costly mistakes. They can also take advantage of opportunities as they arise instead of waiting for a long-term plan to come to fruition.
An agile business plan is a flexible plan that invites adaptations to suit changing circumstances. Rather than create a rigid, long-term plan, agile business planning frequently revisits goals and objectives.
If you want to build an agile business plan, systems integration is a critical part of the process.
Building an agile business plan with systems integration
Achieving business agility requires a high degree of integration between different parts of the organisation to respond to customer needs and market changes quickly.
Systems integration enables business agility by allowing you to test and succeed (or fail) faster. The cost of building a new enterprise application for a pilot program is immense, yet the pilot cannot be conducted thoroughly without access to existing data streams. Systems integration solves this challenge by cutting time-to-market and time-to-value for new applications and initiatives.
Systems integration ensures that your company's disparate systems work together seamlessly, allowing for quick adaptation to change. You can gain a 360-degree view of your customers and their expectations. Such visibility is essential for making the necessary changes to keep up with or move ahead of the competition.
How Creative Folks supports systems integration
When we work with customers who need their systems talking to each other, we look at their applications, the underlying services these applications offer, and then overlay that with their strategy, goals and initiatives. Our expertise lies in understanding your ecosystem, highlighting the possibilities, presenting the options and deploying the right solution - in the right order - for you.
Visit our Systems Integration and cloud integration page for more on our capabilities.
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