The fourth industrial revolution (4IR) is much hyped but little understood. Much like the second industrial revolution, the fourth does not signal the sudden emergence of new technologies, but instead involves the application of existing technologies to radically reengineer the ways in which people live and businesses operate.
This emerged in Johannesburg today, at the opening of the first international Business Agility Institute Conference to be staged in Africa.
Futurist and author Graeme Codrington noted that technologies such as Internet of things (IOT) and artificial intelligence (AI) were in fact third industrial revolution tools.
“The 4IR is about taking these technologies and using them as you reimagine how you might work in a digital revolution,” he said. “Most organisations have done little more than use technology to improve speed or efficiency, but they have not fundamentally changed how things are done. It’s just too easy to improve what we already have. But it’s not good enough if all you’ve done is make your business slightly cheaper, better or faster – you need to have a mindset of reimagination.”
Business Agility for thriving business
Business agility is crucial for organisations to survive and thrive in a fast-changing 4IR era, said business agility experts.
However, because business agility is a movement focused on adapting to constant change, there is no set framework for it.
The journey is a long, hard one, and it can take up to eight years for a business agility journey to become sustainable.
Evan Leybourn, founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute
“There can never be a framework for business agility,” said Evan Leybourn, founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute and pioneer in the field of agile business management.
“There are principles organisations should apply, but business agility really depends on a change in mindset and culture throughout the organisation. The journey is a long, hard one, and it can take up to eight years for a business agility journey to become sustainable.”
Leybourn noted that key focus areas in the business agility transformation should include a shift to become customer obsessed, transformation of people management policies and practices, and an effort to transform the broader ecosystem including partners, distributors and suppliers. “You can only be as agile as your least agile part,” he said.
Agility across the ecosystem
Agility has to permeate the board, strategy, process, operations, and structure. While many companies have tried to break down siloes within the organisation, the fact is this is very difficult to do, Leybourn noted. He advised that instead of trying to end siloes, organisations should take an agile approach to creating siloes optimised for particular goals, creating new coalitions or changing structures as needed.
Customer centricity will be a crucial factor in enabling businesses to thrive in future, speakers said.
The challenge of this lies in how businesses transform themselves to support this. “In most organisations, revenue is the main measure of success. Making customer satisfaction an equally important KPI immediately drives transformation,” Leybourn pointed out.
Echoing this, Russian management consultant, and agile leader at the University of Business Agility, Marina Alex, cited case studies in which making customer experience part of the sales team’s KPIs dramatically improved sales revenues in the long term.
However, she cautioned that projects to transform sales teams into agile teams typically reach a crisis point around six months into the project, when sales dip.
“This could be because sales people are often lone wolves who are not good at working in teams or collaborating across all departments. In addition, management often tries to control every step of sales, and sales tends to think only in terms of numbers – or money. Changing this mindset takes time. Sales has to learn to listen to what the customer needs and work on continually improving collaboration, innovation and customer experience. Customer satisfaction has to be brought into their KPIs. Over time, revenues start to improve.”
Alex said organisations using her SWAY model for agile sales have tripled their sales after 12 months, and crucially – their customer satisfaction has improved too.
“Customer satisfaction is a competitive advantage,” she said. “It’s easy for a competitor to copy products and ideas, but it’s a lot harder for them to copy a company culture,” she said.
The Business Agility Institute Conference, staged by Business Agility South Africa, introduced South African enterprises to best practice for agile transformation, with presentations by 20 expert speakers from seven countries. A second Business Agility Institute African conference will be staged in Nigeria later this year.
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