Change is an invitation for innovation

BMC Software is a Business Reporter client

Massive changes are impacting every industry – and opening up opportunities. Geopolitical factors are forcing organisations to approach supply chain and global operations differently. Socioeconomic trends are shaping new generations of consumers with different expectations. Technological developments continue to accelerate and are creating opportunities for competitive advantage. In addition, the past two and a half years have reshaped the act of work and how people think about and approach it as all these factors come together.

Over time, this amounts to a sea change. We look back and hardly recognise the way we used to do business.

For business leaders, managing the pace of change is the central challenge of our era. Getting it exactly right is hard.

The commonality across addressing these challenges and using them for advantage lies in how companies can digitise and operate in new ways to be more responsive to market changes, more agile in shifting priorities, and more focused on the experiences they provide to employees and customers.

Which prompts a question.

If you had to choose between overestimating the near-term impact of technological change, or underestimating long-term transformation, which would you take?

I think most of us would choose to err on the side of caution, to overestimate the pace of change over the next two years, and to keep overestimating the pace of change every day for the next ten.

Modern business leaders don’t have time to wallow in uncertainty. They key to thriving amid constant technological change is to build and adopt systems that facilitate flexibility.

All of this change is an invitation to innovation.

Today, every company is a technology company and must think with a digital-first mindset to stay ahead of the market and beat their competition.

Digital-first means using technology capabilities and automation to move and adapt quicker to change to serve your employees, customers and ecosystem better.

Recent years have shown us that digital transformation can occur incredibly quickly. During the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw companies thrive based on their ability to adapt to new market realities. History has shown us that disruptive technologies can dramatically change the market landscape for companies in nearly every industry. With digital transformation plans, business leaders do not have to sit idly by as new market entrants disrupt their business, or new external forces in labour markets, from pandemics, or any number of things threaten the future of the enterprise.

At BMC we have a vision for the enterprise of the future, one that is constantly evolving to adapt to an ever-changing world. We call it the Autonomous Digital Enterprise, or ADE. The ADE is one that can identify new opportunities and capitalise on them by leveraging technology to deploy automation everywhere, deliver texperiences, rely on adaptive cyber-security, and extend the agile software development principles known as DevOps to other functions of the organisation. An ADE opeates with agility, leverages insights and has customer focus at its core. It provides faster and higher quality innovation to customers and throughout the entire ecosystem with the purpose of accelereating growth.

It’s no secret that companies are reinventing themselves around digital technology, products and services to meet the rapid changes impacting and influencing them and their customers. Increasing global competition, digital disruptors across all industries, heightened customer expectations, and mounting security and compliance pressures are just some of the elements driving these changes. And with these changes come major opportunities. While innovation is often thought of as a budget luxury, the benefits are clear – it opens the door to opportunity and promotes growth. It must be embedded in all you do and become an overall mindset – a cultural shift enabled by technology.

For us, the ADE is not just a marketing concept. It is a living, breathing ethos that has helped our company remain agile as we run and reinvent our business for an era of maximum technological change.

In other words, we’re on the ADE journey ourselves. We are embracing change with an innovation mindset. With agility and insights, we see change not as threat but as opportunity.

Because of the breadth of our experience in working with the world’s leading brands for more than 40 years, we’re uniquely positioned to help companies master the challenges of the moment. We have lived through disruptions and industrial revolutions with our customers. Today, those challenges come from a range of sources: the changing nature of work, the demand for seamless technological interfaces from employees and customers alike, turbulent market conditions and inflationary pressures, and supply chain disruptions.

But being an agile company means being able to quickly adapt to new pressures in the future.

So how do we put the ADE concepts into practice for our clients?

Data is the lifeblood of every successful business. A data-driven business is always learning – and a data mindset and analytical capabilities are the building blocks for enabling technology and realising the value of data. By collecting, protecting, analysing and applying data from traditional and newer sources such as social media and internet of things (IoT) devices, companies can use that data to yield valuable insights for the business that support growth opportunities or customer experiences.

Data, collected and curated from across the business, can be analysed and distilled into actionable insights, enabling organisations to adjust quickly and effectively. And just as importantly, insights can also reveal the blank space for businesses to expand and anticipate customer needs.

An ADE capitalises on the data throughout the entire value system and creates opportunities for process, product, sales optimisation, marketing solutions, risk prevention and futureproofing, creating new customers and even new markets.

Today, markets are on the cusp of major shifts as several foundational technologies – from 5G to AI – enter the mainstream. Right now, huge portions of the technology stack at many corporations are isolated and siloed. But in the coming years, companies will unlock new value by harnessing the benefits of combined technologies across the stack, from mainframe to IoT and edge computing – much like the synergy between PCs and the internet nearly 30 years ago have expanded to all sorts of connected devices.

The question now facing IT leaders and the C-suite alike is how they can orchestrate data pipelines across the organisation to generate actionable insights, remain agile and adaptable, and to automate routine tasks. Anything they can do to encourage diverse thinking and the adoption of calculated risk taking helps the future of business.

Disruption is coming from all directions, and technology can be a game-changer to freeing up people to invent and create.

Originally published on Business Reporter