Operational agility is the ability of a company to flex and adapt its operations, technology and information to constantly evolving business requirements brought on by market dynamics, competitive pressures and business turbulence.
Operational agility is next level business resiliency. Organizations with operations that flex and adapt to change are naturally able to maintain continuous business operations while safeguarding people, customers and data.
To successfully achieve operational agility in your business there are some structures, tools, and processes to put in place. This is a collaboration between the IT and business organizations.
Operational agility is achieved through digital transformation of systems, processes and workflows.
However, today’s approach of large-scale enterprise-wide transformation does not move fast enough for operational agility. Operational agility requires a dual-track approach to digital transformation that includes rapid cycle innovation. This dual-track approach simultaneously addresses IT-led, enterprise-wide transformation as well as business-led modernization of processes and workflows outside of your core systems that are most sensitive to changing market conditions.
Dual-track transformation is an approach that simultaneously addresses enterprise-wide transformation as well as the modernization of processes that flow across business workflows and workgroups.
To achieve operational agility, rapid cycle innovation is essential. Also known as innovation at the edge, this strategy empowers business professionals outside of IT to propose and create new applications for modernizing existing work and data flows, with the goals of achieving quick wins for the business and supporting long-term transformation efforts.
Operational agility is all about a company’s ability to handle change by flexing and adapting in real-time.
During the disruption of COVID-19 Geisinger Health System, a Pennsylvania-based health care provider, which services over 3 million patients and employs a staff of 26,500, including physicians, advanced practitioners and support staff, had to pivot their staffing model overnight.
They were able to reassign 2,000 employees overnight and adjust to remote work immediately, leaving no gap in care and attention to all their patients as the volume increased.
This report by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by Quickbase, surveys 400 IT leaders and CIOs on the importance of a dual-track approach to transformation.
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Key trends for how businesses looked to modernize and make their operations more flexible in the face of disruption.
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91% of organizations surveyed altered their operating models because of the COVID-19 pandemic; thirty-three percent of the survey respondents describe the changes as “significant.”
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