Three Steps to Improving Business Agility

In a time where the customer experience increasingly demands improvements, small businesses are forced to make quick decisions to remain competitive. The risk is always that a customer will readily take their business to the company that meets their needs. Prioritizing business agility can feel like an overwhelming and shapeless task, but there are three steps that a small business can pursue to make a start:

Prioritize Projects in Terms of Time to Value: Too often, smaller enterprises get hung up on the idea of embarking on a broader business agility project that involves infrastructure or major systems investments. While that may be an appropriate goal, it can be daunting if the budget or other resources aren’t there.

Instead, small businesses can think about upgrades in terms of time to value. There may be low-hanging fruit that allow for quick improvements, delivering immediate benefits to customers or boosting productivity. Businesses are aware that agility is non-negotiable, but given the unpredictability of the market, pursuing a long-term comprehensive digital transformation may seem too daunting and may take too long to show any competitive advantage.

Improve Data Integration: Taking steps to integrate and organize data for better analysis helps provide information you can act on to determine where the most value is gained. This can allow you to better direct investments in cloud solutions and determine which innovations are most worth implementing.

Integration should be a priority so that data isn’t sitting in siloes. A centralized dashboard that gives you real-time performance metrics can help you make smarter decisions for business agility. It’s also important to ensure that data is available and accessible to more than just senior management or IT teams so that employees are empowered to make informed decisions.

Promote Better Communications: One of the key challenges for small businesses wanting to make a change is obtaining buy-in from your team. No matter what level of digital transformation you’re undergoing, it’s often more about getting your team to shift their mindset than the actual technology. When you approach your staff as internal customers, you’ll have a better plan for communicating changes. You’ll listen to their needs for training and their feedback, just as you would an external customer. This will help you pursue digital transformation objectives that work well for everyone – from customers to front-line employees.

These conversations will also enable you to choose technology that is designed to improve business agility in a way that’s user-centric. This may be a change welcomed by your team, particularly if they have been working with an overly complex set of tools. 

If you’re looking for innovations that deliver quick advances in business agility, contact us at One Connect. We can help you identify those processes that will drive fast results in terms of both customer experience and end-user satisfaction.