Business Agility
Empowering the IT function to take advantage of business opportunities and respond flexibly to changing business conditions.
Business agility is a topic on the minds of many business and IT leaders. Business leaders often become frustrated when their organizations cannot quickly and with minimal effort move in a new direction or exploit a new business opportunity because of limits in their technology environment. The inability to be agile too often equals the inability to grow a business.
In market research conducted by Cogentes, we discovered a number of organizations who were literally boxed in by choices they had made in legacy technology systems that were not flexible enough to adapt to changing business requirements. Situations that we observed throughout these interviews include:
- Business leaders complain that the technology function cannot support them quickly enough to respond to new market opportunities.
- The IT function finds it difficult to support new geographies or expansion into new markets.
- Mergers & acquisitions are fraught with technology issues that are never fully resolved.
- New technologies rolled out to support new business initiatives don’t integrate with existing systems.
- Systems are sometimes created and deployed without enough insight into how they will impact other areas of the architecture.
- Legacy technology systems, often heavily invested in, are not compatible with desirable emerging technologies that could help a company exploit new business opportunities. Business leaders place pressure on IT staff to find a way to make the technologies work together.
The Cogentes solution
Cogentes addresses these issues by providing expert analysis, creative problem solving, and solutions implementation from our senior consultants. Our approach is to understand how an organization has leveraged its people, process and technology to create value. Specifically, we will:
- Interview key executive and operations staff first and gain a working sense of the business plan objectives.
- Interview IT leaders and understand the IT operations model they have put in place and the history of success of that model.
- Understand the history of investments in people, process, and technology to see what the money path tells us about culture, values and decision-making strategy.
- Analyze everything we learn from the discovery process and uncover where the fundamental disconnects lie between business objectives and the actual operating model.
- Rationalize the best possible approach for closing the gap between the intended results and the actual results of the operating model.
- Create an implementation plan to substantially narrow the gap between intended and actual results by developing new approaches to leveraging people, process and technology.
- Work with our clients to implement the plan we’ve developed.
- Make adjustments to the plan based on actual business operating conditions.
- Monitor the success of the plan over time and continue to refine it as necessary.
