Moving to a high velocity enterprise: The business of the future

The recent ongoing situation has taught global business leaders, management strategy lessons which no Ivy League school could impart. Lessons came in the form of the global pandemic, customers, clients, employees, and communities; all imparting a different subject. This has completely changed the way we learn, work, do business, deliver services and products, and measure experience.

Before we get into tenets of Enterprise success in post-Covid world, let’s look into evolution in last 3 decades driven by technological advancements:

Internet Economy (The rise of Dotcom, Y2K programs and eBusiness)

Enterprises focused one-business transformation with 3 clearly defined objectives – Enhancing quality, launch of new products and reducing the cost. Mantra was “Better, Faster, Cheaper”

People, Process and Technology were core enablers to these objectives in some shape or form. People driving and enabling new Organization design, Processes becoming more lean and optimized contributing to Kaizen (continuous improvement) and technology bringing the competitive edge through advent of www (world wide web),e-commerce, thin clients (computing at the core) and fat pipes (Broadband).

Digital Economy (The rise of social, mobile, analytics and cloud)

The enterprise focused on digital transformation enhancing 3 key objectives –enhancing multi- channel experience, high speed products engineering and innovative consumption-based model (XaaS).

Mantra became “Experience, Speed and Innovation”

Technology, digitization (Including integration) and business modelling became center stage of this era. Some the facets of successful organizations were:

• Embracing new technologies and First mover advantage
• Early Cloud Adoption
• Convergence of Apps and Infra Operations and implementing Agile and DevOps for IT
• Democratization of Data and Analytics driven decisioning
• Transforming digital experience at various touch points

Now coming to evolution Covid and Post Covid world

Covid and Post Covid Economy (4th Industrial revolution and The rise of rate of change and adaptability)

VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world created the need for transformation beyond the technology units, Entire organizations need to be composable, agile, responsive and adaptive than ever.

As we move towards the post Covid Hybrid world, the broader charter of organizations need to pivot from just focusing on “Speed” to implement Technology to bringing “Velocity” to the entire enterprise to navigate in the right direction through:

1. Continuous Future-proofing of Technology and Architecture:

The pace at which startups and technology powerhouses are creating new software is only paralleled by the pace at which technological foresight is created. There is an urgency to not just monitor these advancements but also to analyze how they can be beneficial to organizational interests and tie to enterprise strategy. There is a balance which needs to be maintained between leveraging the latest and following the architecture standards.

If an establishment just maintains the technology currency and do not leverage the best of the latest tools, functions and technology, a competing business might take over.

2. Industrialization of Cloud:

Businesses have long been leveraging cloud for some or other type of workloads mostly for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), that too in silos, segments and in adhoc manner. There is an immediate need for large-scale industrialization of the cloud from assessment to migration and operations. Organizations will move towards Cloud first and Cloud native enterprise leveraging utilities of Cloud from core Infrastructure to artificial intelligence and evolving technologies like quantum computing. Enterprises will become self-service marketplace for consumption of Apps, APIs (Application Programmable Interface) and Microservices for employees, customers and vendors.

3. Democratization of IT Process Engineering:

From a world of siloed and individual IT processes within Application, Infrastructure, Data and Security to integrated Agile DevSecOps @Scale, we are moving to a world of democratizing IT process engineering. IT Process Engineering will become an enterprise wide phenomenon and will be followed beyond IT organization. We have seen that with firms like ServiceNow moving from IT service management to Enterprise service management in areas from HR to F and A. With digital becoming pervasive, IT process becomes democratized.

4. Resilience through Intelligence:

Reliable data models will be the forerunners in decision-making. The traditional business and operational analytics methods will change to an Artificial Intelligence-driven decisioning, combining Data Science and Machine Learning. Foresight through intelligence will lead to stronger and more resilient business.

5. Unifying Human Experience (desirability) and Digital Twins:

Due to high degrees of isolation in a virtual environment, creating a digital presence and contextualized experience was inevitable. The next frontier is to integrate virtual and Physical world not only to provide consistent human experience but to envision and integrate human desirability through AI. As we move forward in a hybrid world, unified experience integrated with desirability will become a key differentiator for business success.

The Agile Hybrid World of tomorrow

These levers need to be applied in harmony through a “Common foundation POD” within Enterprise transformation o to create a High-Velocity Enterprise, where It is easy to create, deploy, manage, secure, and consume product and services in a Hybrid World.

The focus will pivot to agility, high velocity, adaptability, and innovation in the hybrid world. The integration will lead the way by leveraging siloed teams, processes and technologies as lego blocks reused through the common foundation POD. Organizations that align with these strategies will blaze new growth trajectories, leaving behind unmoved and inflexible competitors in a hybrid world.

The author is SVP and Global Markets Head, Advanced Engineering Services and Data Engineering and Analytics, Zensar Technologies