Beyond Agility, Aiming Business Vitality
Today, the primary challenge for organizations is strategizing and operating in increasingly complex, versatile, and uncertain markets.
Complexity, versatility, and uncertainty are not problems to be eliminated. They cannot be “managed”. Even more, they cannot be mastered, reduced, mitigated, nor simplified. They should be looked at, not as hurdles, but as levers, catalysts, even accelerators to innovate, to reduce operating costs, and to define new ways to increase revenues and deliver business value from IT investments.
But, when both technology capabilities and customer new usages evolve faster than companies can adapt, being agile and responsive is not enough anymore.
In order to provide value to connected, well informed, impatient customers, to beat the commodity trap on product/service prices and quality, companies have to put in place new mechanisms to anticipate the fast pace of evolving market needs.Vitality is the state of being strong and active. It is the power giving continuance of life.
Vitality can be viewed as the optimized balance between (1) agility, the capability of reacting, responding, and adapting to external stimuli, risks, and opportunities, and (2) robustness, the capability of anticipating market changes, creating systems suited to endurance, and coping with external forces or internal changes, tolerating perturbations without having to recurrently rebuild internal systems.
Beyond agility, in order to anticipate and respond to changes, companies should adopt and adapt practices that support “vitality”.