Johannesburg, 18 Sep 2020
Business agility has been a point of discussion in enterprises for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown starkly illustrated the fact that agility can’t be just a talking point – it has to be the culture and operating model at the heart of modern businesses if they are to thrive in future.
This is according to Greg McDonald, Director – Systems Engineering at Dell Technologies South Africa, who was speaking ahead of the Dell Technologies TechByte Business Agility online event to be held in South Africa this month.
“The pandemic was a big test of business agility,” says McDonald. “While remote workers were able to switch on and work from home quite quickly, many organisations found that certain applications didn’t work well from the home environment, IT battled to keep up to speed with security in this environment, and – importantly – a lot of customers were left hanging.”
McDonald says that those organisations that were agile enough to adapt quickly and innovate in the remote work environment found that they were particularly productive during lockdown, and had good feedback from staff on the benefits of working from home. “Those with positive feedback want to continue supporting work from home, or a hybrid environment. We’ve had a lot of enquiries about tools to enable systems management, data centre migration and modernisation, new virtualised environments and failover for home networks during load-shedding.”
Dell Technologies believes today’s agile companies are data driven, flexible, hyper efficient, employee focused and customer obsessed. To enable this, they need to move from inefficient and rigid through to modernisation and digital transformation, a comprehensive data strategy, masterful multi-cloud management capability and automation.
Local enterprises are now looking to holistic approaches to becoming more agile, including providing business agility in the workforce transformation space to attract and retain talent, enhance productivity and enable exceptional customer experience, says McDonald. He says an agile workforce requires role-based personas to deliver the right applications, data and devices; secure collaboration and communications anywhere, any time and on any device; and faster, more efficient workforce services through automation and self-service.
Business agility must also be able to deliver exceptional customer experience that is proactive, predictive and personalised, says McDonald.
Dell Technologies will deep dive into what business agility means today, and how organisations should move to achieve it, in the upcoming TechByte online event on 30 September 2020. Part of a successful series of Dell Technologies online events, this event will focus on the forces shaping global business, a new vision for agile business best practices around workforce enablement, outstanding CX and competitive innovation and how to build business agility with Dell Technologies. Featuring well-known broadcasters Jeremy Maggs and Aki Anastasiou and Dell Technologies experts, the event will address agile business in South Africa, and how to build the flexible foundation for future resilience.
Register now for the free to attend Dell Technologies TechByte Business Agility online event. The first 200 registrations will receive a gift.
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