COLLABORATING TO WIN - CREATING AGILITY IN A COMPLEX WORLD
Whether it is entering and capturing new markets, developing and launching new products and services, staying compliant with the latest governance regulations, delivering on new targets or just fending off the pressure of new competitors, the working climate is becoming increasingly fast moving, complex and unforgiving.
The contemporary world is certainly complex, but it’s the complexity that we have created in our own organisations that is one of the key barriers to achieving that most precious goal of maintaining and enhancing organisational agility. In reality, organisations have developed over time and reflect layers of accumulated processes, procedures and learning. And, of course, their information systems reflect this too - adding further to the challenge.
It should not then come as a shock to discover, that according to a recent survey by consultancy PwC, 77 per cent of global CEOs say that the level of complexity in their organisations is higher than it was just three years ago.
To make matters worse we have created complexity even in the way we describe the challenge of delivering agility. The marketplace is awash with buzz words that describe different approaches to the integration of processes, systems and networks to bring seamless working between employees, partners, suppliers and customers.
Despite all this Logicalis believes that there are five well defined phases, involving the whole of your information systems and their management, through which successful organisations move on the road to manage complexity effectively and unlock agility.
The key stages on the road we believe are Connect, Converge, Mobilise, Collaborate, and Virtualise. These processes involve a holistic view of the networking, data centre and management structures that exist within any organisation and have the capability to drive down costs substantially too. We’ll be discussing these in more detail elsewhere in this newsletter.
But this must be harnessed to the reality of the technologies that are available from the major vendors. Logicalis will deliver a smart solution that makes best use of your legacy technologies and maximises investment when integrating a series of new solutions, services and devices.
Examples of these are: new middleware from companies such as IBM and Openstream; new collaborative functionality at the desktop, borne out of new partnerships between Cisco and Microsoft and between Microsoft and the major telephony vendors. New organisational structures can be enabled through initiatives such as the latest mobile tariffs for fixed and mobile convergence from BT Fusion, and new devices are hitting the market, such as HP’s iPAQ, coupled with new access infrastructure solutions from Citrix, iAnywhere and Softricity.
But even if you are getting the best out of your technology investments, no matter how elegant the infrastructure, unless people are enabled and encouraged to use it, any amount of investment will be wasted. It is process, people and culture that constitute the other resources of an organisation, and they have to change to contribute to an organisation’s agility.
This means bottom-up company structures should be built around flexible, virtual teams and resources that can assemble to meet a need then rapidly be re-deployed in another form. It is these flexible working models that contribute to high levels of customer and employee satisfaction and that can readily use and enhance the knowledge that evolved information systems can provide. Intrinsic to this is a culture that encourages employees to challenge the very idea of having to address fixed information resources.
Whatever the apparent advantages of these changes there still needs to be a clear business case for investment, with hard, measurable returns. But this may not be a top down process. It may well be your users, for instance, who initially challenge the status quo by driving adoption of collaboration technologies from the desktop, creating the expectation that these tools will be delivered. For instance, investment in corporate email may once have been deferred until employees started setting up hotmail accounts for work, and then the benefits of all working on one system soon became clear. The same could soon become true of Instant Messaging (IM) if the experience of the US is any guide.
In the short term, though, the opportunities for making changes and proving business agility are likely to be sector specific, and in many cases, role specific. For example, for the financial services industry, the inability to record calls on mobile phones has hitherto hindered traders doing deals using this technology, and so constraining their business. In the case of IM, it may not be needed for organisational functions by all employees, but for a proportion which is higher than average email users, it could drastically improve their efficiency. But it is certainly coming. According to Gartner analysts, by 2010, 80 percent of companies will have integrated communications (voice/IM/messaging) into some business applications or processes.
So, complexity is a fact of current organisational life. Agility is the key to ongoing success, but it’s the effective access to information and the enablement of knowledge sharing across diverse, flexible organisational structures, that is the key factor in driving agility. Fundamentally, achieving agility requires a new approach to information systems and their use that actively enables the intellectual property that is the lifeblood of any organisation. This requires a migration in systems, structures and attitudes, but a migration on which it is well worth embarking, as it can pay huge dividends.
Over the last year we’ve been building Logicalis in line with this vision. We’ve acquired companies, and with these new skills, intellectual capital and solution sets, we’ve built the scale that enables us to work with customers to deliver on this new approach seamlessly. From handset to desktop to network to data centre, we’ve learned a lot ourselves in doing so and have received a string of awards in the process. Agility in a complex world is not only desirable; it's achievable, and increasingly necessary for success. Logicalis can work with you to make it happen at your organisation.
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