Digital Business Agility

Digital Business Agility

Digital disruption is a threat feared by many industry leaders. To survive against such a disruptor, an organization needs to adapt and transform.
According to Wade, successful digital transformation within an organization requires "Digital Business Agility", essentially made up of three main elements:

• HYPERAWARENESS (Spot future trends)
• INFORMED DECISION MAKING (Accurate decisions)
• FAST EXECUTION (Speed & Implementation)

Hyperawareness is the capability to recognize future trends that will impact an organization. Despite facing numerous factors changing its environment, an organization has to be capable of spotting those tendencies that have the potential for disruption. Hyperawareness is made up of three distinct sub-capabilities:

1. Sensing of new technology trends.
2. Recognizing changes in the competitive landscape, both within and across industries.
3. Capturing new ideas from employees, suppliers, and customers.

Part of hyperawareness is also the need to leave assumptions and theory behind and see first-hand how products and services are being used in practice.

Like hyperawareness, informed decision making has strong digital components that help gather and organize data:

1. Knowledge management systems to organize insights
2. Collaboration systems to facilitate remote conversations
3. Dashboards to display relevant information
4. Analytics systems to provide evidence-based insights to support decision making.

Decisions are informed due to the relevancy of the data and the rigour of the underlying analysis.
Hyperawareness is crucial to anticipate relevant trends. Informed decision making is critical to deciding upon the right course of action.

However, neither of these 2 matters if an organization is unable to quickly execute the necessary changes. Fast execution combines following elements:

1. Speed
2. Implementation

High levels of bureaucracy and organizational silos are the enemy of fast execution. Organizations that execute quickly are typically empowered to take action at lower levels of the company hierarchy.

In order to achieve the full benefits of digital business transformation, organizations need to have and balance all three elements of digital business agility.

⇒ Do you agree these are the 3 key components of Digital Business Agility?

Sources:
Michael Wade, (2015) "A Conceptual Framework for Digital Business Transformation", Global Center for Digital Business, 2015, June, pp. 1-16