Change is an obstacle that every company encounters, but improving business agility can help enterprises can stay ahead of the times.
As the saying goes, change is one of the few constants in life. While many businesses understand the importance of embracing change to maintain or improve their competitiveness within their market, it’s a practice that’s much easier said than done.
One study conducted by Strategy&, the global strategy consulting team at PricewaterhouseCoopers, found that half of respondents believed their organizations lacked the capability to consistently adapt. Meanwhile, 65% of respondents also said “change fatigue” was a major problem—employees were simply unable to keep up with the pace of change at their companies. Companies want to be agile, but getting there is clearly difficult.
Technology Lies at the Heart of Agility
To be agile, enterprises need to be able to embrace market and operational change as it arises. This starts by looking at where agility actually begins—technology. Business agility relies heavily on the ability to make the right business decisions at the right moment, and technology plays a pivotal role in discovering and acting on this critical information. If companies are able to consistently make the right decisions at the right time, they can avoid issues such as change fatigue by eliminating needless or low-value changes.
However, relying on IT to improve agility isn’t without its own obstacles either. IT departments have their own priorities and, in many scenarios, trying to keep up with constantly shifting business needs and requirements can be a source of conflict between IT and the rest of the organization. It ultimately goes back to being able to take the right action at the right time—if IT can’t make the appropriate technology adjustments to address a new opportunity in time, it may shift or be irrelevant by the time they get to it.
Pave the Way to Agility with Automated Decision-Making Processes
Business experts are the people who best understand what decisions should be made and when to make them, but the reliance on IT to implement changes to the underlying technology presents an obstacle. However, with a business rules engine (BRE), business rules can be separated from source code, empowering experts to make the appropriate changes when the time arises.
With a BRE, companies can finally bolster agility. Decision-making processes can be automated and the rules powering these decisions can be modified as needed. This capability translates into complete agility, empowering enterprises to keep pace—or even leap frog—shifts in the market.
If you’d like to learn more about how BREs like Progress Corticon can impact business agility, download our recent whitepaper. If you’re attending BBC 2016, you could also drop by booth #116 to talk to one of our Corticon experts in person.
Adam Day
Adam is a Director of Product Marketing at Progress. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.