Keep Your Enterprise Agile With a Silicon Valley Startup Mindset
By Iain Scholnick, Founder and CEO, Braidio
The digitization of the workplace has allowed for many advancements and increased efficiencies, but this only applies to those who understand the implicit or soft value of technology, which is to be the on-ramp to your company “agility” makeover. Many companies today are lagging behind their peers by being unable to adapt fast enough. This lack of agility is leaving employees disconnected inside work silos and investors unhappy. Organizations need to embrace transformative change through agile technology and more importantly, do so continually. The result is a company that is fully liquid, ready to go in any direction that provides the most efficiency at a moments’ notice.
Faced with intimidating competition from data-savvy titans like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, staid Fortune 500 enterprises need to deliver specific, verticalized solutions to meet the precise needs of today’s professional buyers within specific marketplaces. The smart ones will partner with nimble, agile companies to jump the curve. We expect the trend towards verticalization to accelerate, as increasingly mobile, multinational workforces demand bespoke tools to stay in communication and maximize productivity.
Braidio supports a diverse group of industries with no code/low code app development, so the decision makers with the deepest, most nuanced understanding of their business can assemble their perfect workstream – in a fraction of the time. Braidio’s solution is years ahead, allowing companies to leapfrog the competition. Teams in healthcare, telecommunications, field services, financial services, pet wellness, and more use Braidio every day.
451 Research coined the term, “The Liquid Enterprise” to describe organizations that have created an agile culture to quickly respond to change and will be best positioned to win in the future of work. We’re all being impacted by the digitization of the workplace, the rapid pace of change across markets, and customer requirements. So how do you cultivate a culture change to create enterprise liquidity in your organization?
Federating Liquidity Between Entrenched Functional Silos – Even small organizations create data and knowledge silos between departments. You’re probably aware that people don’t execute their daily workflows linearly; most work is done cross departmentally, so it is important to help bridge and streamline those workflows. Breaking down these silos opens the entire organization, allowing for an easier transfer of information, and enabling faster communication and results.
Company Wide Collaboration – There are so many tools on the market today that enable real-time chat, voice, and video collaboration that provide organizations the opportunity to collaborate and share knowledge. Finding the correct system can take time, but it’s important to find the optimal balance between ease of communication, organization, and time management. Most importantly, ensure that the entire organization has one default collaboration system. Too often, companies are muddled down by multiple collaboration systems, making it difficult for employees to stay focused and even more difficult for new employees to get ramped up. The cost savings on onboarding alone make it well worth sticking to one encompassing tool that acts as a data and people orchestrator tied to a robust permissioning layer, featuring both knowledge sharing and cross-company communication and collaboration to empower enterprise liquidity.
Take the Pulse with Search & Discovery It is extremely beneficial to constantly get feedback from the market, your customers, and your employees to understand everything that’s happening in your industry. Using keyword search and discovery to distill customer sentiment, the latest trends, new competitors, wants, needs, and ideas for improvement across your products, services, and even your processes are all critical pieces of information that you should always be thinking about. Hidden inside all of these data inputs is a new idea or way of doing something that can help push your business ahead of the competition. Being able to apply easy to use and affordable analytics against your raw search and discovery data to orchestrate actionable plans to improve problem areas is a sign of true liquidity. Remaining attentive to internal and external environments surrounding your organization gives you that agility that very successful businesses possess.
Don’t Boil the Ocean – How do you eat watermelon? One slice at a time. Take small, quick steps towards evolving and making progress. While your current processes may be outdated, throwing all of them out at the same time could be extremely detrimental. Take your time and analyze which areas of the business are in most need of help currently, and which are sustainable. The last thing you want to do is scare off top talent, so take some time to map out a clear plan of change moving forward, and explain the changes in detail to your staff. This also lets you quickly change course or optimize based on the current market conditions and/or changing customer needs. As technology is constantly changing, it is possible parts of your plan can outdated before they’re even implemented. Always be prepared to stop on a dime and choose a new direction.
Completing these steps can seem daunting at first, but the point is to change the way the entire enterprise works. Plenty of companies fail after refusing to stay agile and keep up with the pace of change in the business world. The steps above aim to tear down the old way of thinking by orchestrating a liquid revolution making your company capable of thinking for itself. Putting power back into your employees hands with a central collaboration system, listening to and addressing customer feedback, and optimizing new processes clearly and quickly are all critical steps on your way to becoming a liquid enterprise.