FUTURE-PROOFING ORGANIZATIONS FOR WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW
Numerous forces are changing the nature of our organizations and society. The Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century and the advent of mass production of 20th Century profoundly altered our world. Our world today will be shaped by the knowledge economy built on resilience which will be digitally inspired via unprecedented connectivity along with the evolving mix of hazards, risks, and threats. Today, we must embrace innovation in our industry and our organizations to lessen the impacts to our infrastructure of shocks and stresses to come to.
The changes caused by the new industrial revolution has the potential to ripple across organizations and societies – not just how we work but the infrastructure that we rely on. To harness its great potential – amid increasing population and ubiquitous connectivity (technology, societies and economy) – we must acknowledge the inter-dependency of the physical and digital worlds and use it as the groundwork to build strategies for future-proof infrastructure. But first, we need to begin implementing steps to enable our organizations to dramatically improve its capacity, responsiveness and ability to capitalize on what is happing now and lever it to build a new generation of infrastructure that can cope and adapt to our changing environment The steps to preparedness consists of four (4) areas: collaborative awareness, innovative culture, rapid agility and effective resources.
Collaborative Awareness
Organizations must nurture curiosity and engage a large ecosystem. We must be a deliberate and sustained awareness to understand trends, industry developments, and business models that prove of strategic value. We should engage vendors, manufacturers, and academia to gain insight on technology’s cutting edge “and either prepare for the blow or find a way to wield the tools”. And there must be a willingness to collaborate, share, and learn from industry’s successes and failure, and take inspiration from elsewhere.
Innovative Culture
Preparing infrastructure of the future will embrace resilience, adaptability, and creativity. Demonstrating an openness to new ideas and ways of design, doing business, etc. are essential to creating an organizational culture that stimulates innovation. Organizations must encourage creative risk-taking and investing in technology, training, and processes. We must look past incremental improvements and adopt a more embolden approach to innovation and securing the engineering talent to build our future infrastructure. Our industry and organizations need evolve to this new era.
Rapid Agility
IBM’s CEO, Virginia Rometty, told her employees to “think fast, move faster” in a company-wide video. She understands that we need to avoid becoming mired in the bureaucracy that brings change to an abrupt halt. Organizations must embrace rapid iteration and proof of concepts to boost their agility. We need to lever the digital revolution to create new norms for infrastructure management and operation.
Effective Resources
Access to capital, partnerships and the right people is critical to organization capacity to prepare to the wave of digital disruption that is already happened and will accelerate over time. But in our industry, these are merely seen familiar challenges – as well as “doing more with less”. It’s vital that organizations have all of these resources to evolve effectively – having just one or two is a recipe for failure. With the massive infrastructure needs of the future, and against the reality of constrained budgets, the time is now to bring innovation to funding and project delivery.
THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW
Organizations face serious, significant challenges in their preparedness for digital disruption and understanding the incredible opportunities to improve our future-proofing, and to become better prepared for what’s to come. Prepared organizations will share characteristics described above that others can adapt for themselves. If our organizations, take concrete action today, we know that the results will yield stronger, more efficient organizations that can withstand – and thrive within – a storm of change as well as our changing environment.