This blog is the latest in our series looking at the importance of digital agility in helping your organization stay ahead of the competition.
As digital transformation continues at pace and competition for talent and customers is as fierce as ever, one concept is quickly rising up organizations’ agendas – digital agility. But what exactly does this mean? Put simply, digital agility is how easily an organization can adapt to changing business needs by leveraging digital technologies. This can include optimizing current digital processes and upgrading hardware and software, or embracing completely new technologies and channels.
By becoming more digitally agile, organizations improve their adaptability in every area of business – from being able to quickly launch new services to customers, to easily deploying new tools to their hybrid workforce. It’s no surprise that firms are paying attention to this idea, given that Gartner found organizations with high digital dexterity are 3.3 times more likely to succeed in their digital transformation efforts.
Why is digital agility important?
With customer expectations for digital services soaring, businesses need to provide engaging digital experiences to retain existing customers and attract new ones. Equally, employee demands in the hybrid age have drastically shifted, with workers expecting slicker tools and intuitive processes to help them complete their work. Digital agility is therefore essential for both companies and their employees to thrive.
To illustrate this with an example: imagine a company that sells tickets for entertainment and sporting events. The company decides it wants to launch a mobile app version of its services, having witnessed its major competitor develop and roll out an app within six months. But because the company lacks the optimized systems and dynamic workforce its competitor benefits from (or in other words, the company in our example has low digital agility) it instead takes two years to launch its app. In the meantime, our ticket company continues to lose market share to its more digitally agile competitor.
As this example demonstrates, digital agility is about more than just releasing new software. It’s about being capable of rapid change and innovation, and having a workforce that can adapt quickly.
What are the benefits of being digital agile?
To be a digitally agile firm means your organization has the capability to rapidly develop and roll out new digital innovations, and to build a team that can quickly adapt to any changes and adopt new technologies. Boosting digital agility can deliver numerous benefits, including:
- Increasing your innovation potential, allowing you to bring ideas to market quicker.
- Improving employee productivity by enhancing collaboration between individuals, enabling the whole team to adapt and collectively respond to changes in work practices.
- Driving more efficient practices that enable your organization to respond to market changes or macro trends more quickly.
- Creating a dynamic workforce ready to adopt new digital tech, which will make your digital transformation strategies more likely to succeed.
So how can you improve digital agility and make the most of these gains? We’ll cover this and talk more about what drives digital agility in our next blog. And in the meantime, check out Scalable Software’s workplace analytics solution, Acumen, for more info.
Acumen helps you assess and benchmark the digital competency of your workforce today and identify gaps in current technology utilization. Automated recommendations then help you drive greater adoption of digital technologies that enable agile operations, and track how these changes are helping you achieve your goals. By becoming more digitally agile, you’ll never have to worry about being behind on new app launches or failing to meet changing demands. Instead, you can guarantee your business will stay ahead of the competition every step of the way.
Stay tuned for our upcoming blog where we’ll talk about the three key drivers of digital agility.
