What is Digital Agility? 3 Key Benefits to a Digital Transformation Strategy for your Business
What is Digital Agility?
Digital Agility is all about adaptability. It requires businesses to quickly update or change their processes when they need to. It requires consideration of every part of the IT function, including hardware and software.
Sometimes known as Digital Transformation, Digital Agility pushes for digital innovation. It forces companies to evolve their digital strategies to reach desired outcomes.
Growing Trend or Fruitless Fad?
Like all new business strategies, digital agility has its supporters and its critics. Whether you are for or against it, the International Data Corporation (IDC) think it is here to stay. Their forecasts show digital agility spending reaching $1.97 trillion in 2022. This is an annual increase in spending of 16.7 percent from 2017 to 2022.
What are the Benefits of Digital Agility?
Having read about digital agility, you may be wondering “why should I care about this?”. There are several key benefits to digital transformation.
Increase your Adaptability
Your business can benefit from being more capable of adapting to market changes. A digital agility strategy means that most of the hard work is already done. That means that you can react swiftly to market changes. This helps keep your business running smoothly for your employees and customers.
A Boost to your Competitive Advantage
Innovation is key to building sustainable competitive advantage. Digital transformation can therefore be an asset for your company. Putting in place these processes has been shown to improve productivity, profitability, and to reduce costs. Embracing change can be the difference between leading your market and falling behind your competition.
Streamline your Processes
Digital transformation uses automation to review and clean data. You can then bring together data in an easy to access and organised way. This makes it easy to identify market trends and areas for improvement.
How do I become Digitally Agile?
Now that you know the benefits of digital transformation, you might be wondering where to start with it.
Below are a list of the key considerations for those moving towards a digitally agile way of working.
Drive Home a Digital Culture
Embedding a digital culture is the first hurdle that you will need to overcome. Convincing senior managers of the benefits of digital transformation isn’t easy. Then, you need to secure company buy-in. Otherwise, your digital strategy will likely fail at the first big market change.
This also means embracing change so that you are ready to adapt to, or even capitalise on, market changes.
Building the Right Processes
Advanced analytics and cognitive computing are just two ways that data can be used to drive business decisions. Setting up these processes takes time at first, but will save time when key decisions need to be made.
Keep your Data Clean
Reviewing the quality of your data is essential when becoming digitally agile. This means removing any incomplete or corrupted data. Failing to do this could mean you make bad decisions following large market changes. It is therefore important to set up some automation to consistently review data and sort inconsistencies
How has Covid-19 affected Digital Agility
The pandemic has forced businesses to reconsider how they make decisions. The sheer amount of change needed in a short period of time put the spotlight on digital transformation. Never before had companies of all sizes felt so much pressure to make their business models fit changing requirements.
55% of companies say the pandemic has resulted in permanent changes to their organisational strategy.
Changing Market Landscape
Businesses have already made changes to their strategy. Sixty percent of businesses say that Covid-19 has forced them to adapt their change management processes. Cloud-based activities have also seen a large uptake, with 64% of businesses making these changes. We’re living during a time that demands rapid change, quick launches, and innovative solutions, and many companies have already taken the first steps to achieve this.
How can IT Asset Disposal help with Digital Agility
IT Asset Disposal should be a key consideration for your business when moving towards a digitally agile strategy. IT Asset Disposal can ensure that you can make IT changes faster. It will allow your company to recover some of the value from redundant IT.
Changing IT Requirements
Digital transformation means new technological and software needs. That also means that your IT suite will need to change too. IT asset disposal can help return some of the value from your old IT assets when you need to upgrade your equipment.