America One is Committed to Helping Client Companies Create An Agile and Adaptive Enterprise

The world is driven by events:  new products and transforming technologies, innovative strategies and emerging business models, economic shifts and regulatory mandates.  Virtually every day, virtually every company in every industry is challenged by one or more of these events. Only by establishing an agile framework able to adapt to these events, can an organization continually create the business value that results in enhanced revenues, profitability and competitive advantage.

Succeeding in the Face of Uncertainty

Because the pace and rhythm of events is increasingly heated, variable and unpredictable, the verities of the old production economy no longer hold. To succeed in the face of uncertainty, companies need to create an Agile Enterprise that is responsive and self-correcting – not simply among senior executives but at every level of the organization.

But what exactly is an Agile Enterprise? A Study by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Kellogg School of Management found that companies with the highest shareholder returns were those that focused on automating information flows and communications with their employees, customers and business partners. For successful companies, the linkage between people, information and technology is critical. That’s because better information flows do more than keep costs down: they help allocate resources toward those activities that will have a positive impact and the most return for the company.

The Agile Enterprise is therefore a high-performance organization able to sustain competitive advantage across volatile business cycles and industry disruptions.  The Adaptive Enterprise achieves this advantage by aligning business needs with technology in order to create a practical framework that enhances intelligence, collaboration and decision-making throughout the entire corporation so that every person has secure access to the information and insight they need to effectively respond to both current and future events.  Superior performance then becomes the sum total of the tens of thousands of effective actions and decisions that individuals at every level of the corporation can now make every day.

To become agile, a company needs to optimize its business processes and workflow to provide accurate, timely and targeted business information to an unlimited number of users, both inside and outside the organization. Critical information locked away in disparate enterprise systems must be made readily available, so the widest number of users can easily access, analyze, distribute, collaborate on and leverage it to effectively perform the most critical aspects of their jobs. Ensuring that actionable information is constantly available and flowing across organizational boundaries is among the most challenging tasks facing a modern corporation.  It is also a core competency of an Agile Enterprise that is able to sustain high performance and competitive advantage in the face of uncertainty and constantly changing events.

Five Critical Characteristics of the Agile Enterprise

1.   The Ability to Capture Information

An Agile Enterprise leverages technology to capture and store the widest variety of relevant information, in the widest variety of formats, from the widest variety of sources — both inside and outside the corporation.  Information can range from invoices and purchase orders to sales and marketing statistics to competitive analyses and research reports. Formats can include paper, email, MS Word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, audio, video, and more. Sources can range from branch offices and divisions to external research organizations, business partner extranets – even competitive websites. Once this information is captured, it is digitally stored and classified according to constantly evolving taxonomies in order to minimize overload while ensuring context and relevance.

2.  The Ability to Distribute Information

An Agile Enterprise leverages technology to continually distribute targeted information to its employees, customers and business partners.  Technology is also utilized to track and understand the evolving needs of the organization’s user population, then customize distribution of information to each person’s individual needs.  Distribution can employ both push and pull technologies to ensure that the right information is delivered to the right people at the right time.

3.  The Ability to Analyze Information

Information without insight is worthless.  The Agile Enterprise therefore employs technology to create timely insights into the company’s customers, competitors, channels and products, plus the external economic and regulatory environment.  The result is reports, statistical predictions, integrated forecasts and position papers that align execution with strategy then measure performance across the organization.  Equally important, by enabling workers to transform disparate information into competitive knowledge, the Agile Enterprise empowers individuals at every level of the corporation to effectively respond to both current and future events.

4.   The Ability to Collaborate

The Agile Enterprise is a borderless enterprise in which collaborative technologies unleash the collective power of the company across organizational boundaries for true competitive advantage. Collaboration means sharing information across time and space. Collaborative technologies also permit users to tap into the powerful knowledge that exists throughout the enterprise. Tacit knowledge that resides – not in corporate databases or paper documents – but in other people’s brains.   Ideas, theories and opinions, overlapping pools of intellectual capital brought together into either ad hoc project teams or communities of practice.

5.  The Ability to Act Decisively

By giving people what they need when they need it, the Agile Enterprise transforms information into action – action that can have an immediate, positive and tangible effect on business value, performance and competitive advantage.