How to make Business Agility a reality

Organisations that are focused, resilient, responsive, adaptable, versatile and able to sustainably innovate are successful. Taken together, these traits are known as ‘Business Agility’.

The benefits are significant, including a 70% greater likelihood of being in the top quartile of organisational health, the best indicator of long-term performance¹. Despite this, business journals are littered with failures, such as Tom Tom, which lost most of its stock value overnight as Google released free Android software doing the same thing².

At NTT DATA, we know it doesn’t have to be this way. This paper assesses the underlying challenges and describes our Business Agility framework to help clients thrive in the years to come.

How Business Agility actually works – and its benefits

Business Agility empowers organisations to balance speed and stability to exploit change rapidly, whilst maintaining core activities. This means:

• The ability to build the right things by being able to identify products and services that customers want and which will generate the right return on investment for the company
• Having the capabilities to build things right (in the right way) through operational discipline, smart technology, incremental building and rapid learning cycles
• Building the products and services at the right speed to deliver value in time, to both the customers and company ownership. This is achieved by focusing effort and resources on fewer priorities, and using adaptive ways of working.

Organisations that do all these things successfully also exhibit another overarching characteristic, which is the driving force behind Business Agility – a supportive culture driven by a committed leadership team and vision that inspires them to continually challenge the status quo and to look for better ways of doing things.

Building and maintaining good levels of Business Agility is certainly something worth striving for, as it represents a sustainable competitive advantage. Recent research covering 237 companies across 23 industries found that organisations with higher levels of Business Agility achieved greater internal and external business benefits

And the benefits increase further where Business Agility is a clear part of the business strategy. Strategic adopters are 71% more likely to grow profitably than non-adopters.