Maintaining agility in the face of change
by Oussama Ziadé

Change has become today’s business environment constant. The ability to proactively adapt is one of the most important criteria for organisations to survive. The pace of change has accelerated dramatically – where business cycles cover a mere 12-18 month span, compared to the 5-7 year span of decades past. Nowadays, when a strategic plan has been set, it is predicted to change in 6-12 months, sending a domino effect upon all business operations and supporting capabilities and a clear need for strategic realignment.

Current management tools have not been altogether successful in solving this problem. Organisations have become like large ships, speeding along in the fog, using ineffective tools for spotting bad weather or icebergs, weakening their ability to avoid or circumvent disasters. Various organisational initiatives have also posed futile solutions, with their treatment of one-time dilemmas, while fundamental problems of predictability and response are faintly addressed.

Ineffective and Untimely Response

Historically, if structural changes were needed for complex systems, such as metropolitan regions, architects examined blueprints to identify the impacts of proposed or developing changes and prepare timely responses. Similarly, large organisations need the same foundational blueprint from which to work. However, most organisations don’t possess a consolidated blueprint. Rather, most essential pieces are distributed throughout the business without a centralised focus, leaving fragments buried in processes, loosely referred to within departments or singly tied to automated applications.

Management teams rely heavily on external advisors/consultants for the delivery of narratives translating a blueprint to text format. They rely on these constituents to provide recommendations, based on their discovery process. As a consequence, they end up spending large sums on the effort of delivering static snapshots of the business and sparse explanations of interlinked relationships. This process often falls far short of delivering the real-time input needed to successfully run a dynamic operation as results become obsolete in a matter of weeks or months, are unavailable to stakeholders, and management is rendered an ineffective entity in timely prediction and response to change.

A Dynamic, Real-time Approach

By investing in an electronic, dynamic organisational blueprint that truly integrates operations with strategy, management can provide a more comprehensive and continuous overview of performance against goals and objectives. This requires the business architecture to be pushed out to the entire enterprise, opening up information flows to all decision-makers, enabling a cross-sectional view of strategic goal levels, objectives, rules, and business drivers with the operation of processes, organisations, systems and assets.

Upon gaining this new perspective, an organisation can play “what-if” scenarios, trace processes to strategy, uncover orphan strategies or capabilities, and predict impacts on the business environment. In addition, both the management team and knowledge workers have access to bird’s-eye and magnified views of the associated processes needed to accomplish the goals presented. This places all strategic and operational concepts and functions in a streamlined perspective, setting control factors in their proper place.

Continuous Alignment

Achieving this new angle requires true executive sponsorship; the ability to produce visible, incremental results that maintain stakeholder interest; investment value disclosed in a timely fashion; and documented assumptions revisited and re-analysed. By identifying decision-making capabilities upfront, modelling architects have a directed purpose, with value-chain analysis and process step modelling at their disposal. And they’ll uncover a dynamic and evolving blueprint that unleashes powerful decision-making capabilities and commanding proactive responses to changes as they occur.

Today’s business framework requires an interconnected, intelligent approach to survival. Those organisations able to leverage capabilities and maintain agility in the face of change will be among the most successful, as they continuously align operations to strategy.