[vc_row][vc_column width="2/3"][vc_column_text]An agile technology platform can help your company deliver on your digital transformation objectives. Businesses are engaging with various different approaches towards Digital Transformation (DX) to remain relevant in face of external pressures. As soon as 2020, 47% of all sales will be influenced by digital channels, as shown in this Forrester Infographic, a startling fact that signifies that agility has become is imperative to the success of any business looking at successfully competing in a rapidly changing environment. The aim for all of us is to become an organisation that can respond to new opportunities or competitive threats as quickly and effectively as possible. Organisations that are unable to change quickly are the ones bound to be slow to capturing market shifts and face the threat of becoming irrelevant.
How do you respond to this trend and remain competitive? The key to any successful DX is the ability to ensure you’re adaptable and operating effectively in the ‘present’, which means your company should not only think with an agile mindset but also possess an agile technology platform to respond to demand and communicate with customers.
The agile process in technology is a concept businesses are beginning to adopt in order to introduce new applications for the digital age. Agility helps your company adopt digitisation by taking small cost effective steps for trial and error as the world around it continuously moves the goal post. This process of ‘try and if you don’t succeed, try again’ means a global five-year fixed term strategy is no longer appropriate for the world in which we now operate. Your customers move fast and change their habits which means it’s almost impossible to keep track. Businesses need to be nimble and fast in their approach, constantly thinking
‘How I can communicate with the customer and capture their needs to deliver what they want?’
The major challenge on this path to application development is arriving at consensus across the company. Obtaining agreement early in the process from the involved business units not only enables you to design the right solution for the right team but also helps to minimise the times you go wrong, and achieve financial buy-in from your internal stakeholders from the get go. This makes total sense: an agile organisation ultimately empowers its local units and geographies to be more responsive and adapt to local customer trends, creating the right mix of bureaucracy with nimbleness and innovation.
Once you have buy-in, what are the characteristics of an agile platform? Adopting an agile process is only made possible if your technology platform has three characteristics: openness, modularity and extensibility. Your platform should support the design, creation and deployment of advanced applications, without developers having to acquire specialised communications expertise.
- An open platform will be much easier for your organisation to leverage and integrate with virtually any third-party data and applications
- A modular platform allows you to select a range of capabilities over time to meet your company’s goals and initiatives and drive business results that will change over time
- An extensible platform is something your organisation can expand and adapt as your business changes, shaping new, innovative and differentiated customer and employee experiences, as well as accommodating new and future requirements
Guest Blog by Peter Kamm, Consulting Sales Engineer, Global Accounts at Avaya
