Business Resilience
Act now to prepare to quickly respond to changing market conditions and competitive pressures.
- The only thing we can predict about unpredictable events is that they will continue to happen.
- The examples are infinite, but the goal is the same: maintain operations and bounce back quickly to thrive.
- Being able to quickly respond to market conditions separates organizations between those that thrive and those that decline.
Resilience Matters in a Digital-First, Disrupted World
The only thing we can predict about unpredictable events is that they will continue to happen. Competitive product launches, economic turbulence, and black swan events are going to be more frequent and bring the potential for severe organizational consequences.
The COVID pandemic taught us that resilience matters. Retailers who pivoted to online, delivery, and pickup models outsold their competitors. Financial services firms that accelerated digital adoption grew, and manufacturers who modernized their operations continued to deliver.
The examples are infinite, but the goal is the same: maintain operations and bounce back quickly to thrive.
By accelerating resiliency programs, organizations can anticipate, prepare, respond and adapt to these sudden interruptions — and have the ability to repeatedly respond at scale.
Remove Headwinds and Achieve Business Resiliency
Like a professional athlete who must always be ready for game day, organizational resiliency requires preparation, active engagement and attention. Focus on the following four areas to keep your organization at the top of the podium.
- Get your organization in shape by reducing technical debt and simplifying a complex technology and process landscapes
- Be prepared to play through bad-weather days by reducing exposure to regulatory and compliance risks, supply chain slowdowns and cybersecurity threats
- Automate the fundamentals of your game intelligently to increase quality and efficiency. Apply critical thinking and expertise to stay focused on a winning strategy
- Innovate purposefully to create agility and disrupt when it matters most, staying ahead of the competition and the market
Reduce Technical Debt and Complexity to Get In Shape For What’s Next
Legacy operational systems, quick fixes over sustainable approaches, and outdated technology are just some of the causes of technical debt in the modern enterprise. This burden has left organizations out of shape and unable to respond quickly to new challenges and opportunities. Similar to financial debt, technical debt is a drain on resources. Like having too much high-interest financial debt, technical debt compounds over time, creating organizational inefficiency and poor resource utilization, costing up to 40% more to operate.ii
Paying off technical debt is like paying down financial debt and doing so can get the organization back in shape and ready to deliver products quickly. Here is how:
- Understand and document the technology and process portfolio (financial portfolio)
- Prioritize what systems, applications or processes to tackle first based on cost or usage (identify high-interest debt)
- Incrementally pay down one component at a time (prioritize payment of high-interest debt first)
- Continuously review and rebalance your approach to paying down your debt as priorities and market conditions change (variable interest rates)
Proactively reducing legacy systems and complicated processes simplifies organizational complexity, which decreases time to market, reduces the cost to manage technical infrastructure, and improves product delivery.
What is Technical Debt?
CIOs estimate that tech debt can amount to 20 - 40% percent of the value of their entire technology estate before depreciation.
For larger organizations, this translates into hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid debt.
For example, if you have a project that costs $1M, you can expect the total cost to be up to $1.4M when you factor in the technical debt.
The outstanding amount of money an organization must spend on digital technology cost obligations to continue doing business.
Proactively Protect the Organization and Manage Your Risk Exposure
Digital is inevitable. But becoming digital introduces more potential risk in the form of regulatory compliance, supply chain disruptions and cyber threats. Managing risk enables growth and helps organizations fulfill their regulatory commitments. Protecting your organization so you can withstand and play through bad weather events, or any weather, is critical to organizational performance, growth, and reputation.
By proactively understanding risks and establishing a risk compliance framework, organizations can protect against potential breaches, supply chain slowdowns and compliance needs - managing risk exposure, improving service delivery and avoiding unforeseen expenses.
Automate Intelligently Beyond Cost Efficiency to Increase Quality & Game-Winning Strategies
Muscle memory can be an athlete’s greatest weapon. The ability to not think about their swing, kick, jump or throw becomes conditioned. The same is true for any organization using technology to automate basic operations. Intelligent or selective automation provides greater quality through increased accuracy and the ability to scale the workforce for roles requiring strategic and critical thinking. This type of selective automation enables organizations to:
- Leverage a scalable digital workforce that consistently accelerates enterprise objectives and augments human productivity
- Streamline processes and increase efficiencies
- Realize labor cost savings and substantial return on value
By harnessing these advanced technologies and applying them strategically at the enterprise level, organizations can learn to anticipate, prepare for and adapt to disruptions - becoming more resilient and able to produce game-winning strategies.
More than one third of technology leaders believe that greater automation investments must be made to improve customer experience, workforce or operations areas.iii
Purposefully Innovate to Stay Agile and Disruptive When it Matters Most
Athletes who stay on their toes and in the ready position are agile and quicker to react to their next moves. Attaining and sustaining a competitive advantage requires internal innovation. By understanding how value is delivered to customers it becomes possible to target innovation and new ideas to the places where they will have the greatest impact. At the same time, building innovation into operations creates a sustainable platform for improvement.
Leading organizations are becoming very purposeful in how and where they apply innovation and connect it to execution to:
- Launch new products to market
- Create new business models
- Continuously improve operations
- Understand their market, competitors and macro business issues
Organizations who are prepared to innovate purposefully and at scale can create more revenue, and ultimately become more resilient.
In this dynamic era, the ability to quickly respond to changing market conditions, new operating models and competitive pressures will be what separates organizations that thrive from those that decline.
iSource: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Services 2022 Predictions
ii https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/tech-debt-reclaiming-tech-equity
iii Source: Future Enterprise Resiliency & Spending Survey Wave 1, IDC, February 2021