Rethinking how things get done, part 4: Moving to an agile operating model

Imagine you’ve just woken up from a deep sleep. Your enterprise is operating just as you’ve always dreamed. It’s listening to customers, innovating, and designing and launching new products and services quickly. It’s also collaborating more (both internally and externally and with thought leaders) and responding agilely to changing business demands. Overall, the enterprise is moving from strength to strength, generating new revenue in unexpected areas, maintaining good margins and driving growth.

How did something like this happen? There likely was a pivot point when you realize that you have to operate your enterprise in a different way. Traditional operating principles worked only in the non-digital world—a new approach to running an enterprise is required for today’s dynamic, fast changing and digitalized business environment. 

Measuring the “soft areas” towards operating as an insight-driven agile organization

One of the first key operating principles to embrace is the use of insights (from market, customers and inside the organizations) to provide a big picture of how your enterprise is operating and to drive decision-making in every area. This requires making sure that you’re measuring the right things, in particular, “soft areas” that are crucial to the organization’s performance such as innovation, collaboration, customer engagement, and the mind-set and motivation of your employees. Overall, this type of operating model provides a real-time, comprehensive and realistic understanding of what is actually happening across the entire enterprise instead of what management thinks is happening.

The enterprise can then act on the insights, aligning its governance, decision-making and overall operations with what the insights reveal. The insights can drive new initiatives, and the enterprise can quickly understand if an initiative is successful, modifying or ending it, as necessary. With this type of approach, managing the enterprise becomes a far more dynamic and agile process, with new insights continually driving new actions.

Automation will increasingly drive this new operating approach. Technologies, such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, will drive insight generation and decision-making, providing management and employees with a far richer understanding of the business in formulating their strategies and making their decisions.

Visualizing your connected enterprise in motion

To support the move to an insight-driven agile operating model, consider the concept of an enterprise digital twin. This involves identifying where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow, enabling you to visualize your enterprise in motion, so to speak. Your enterprise digital twin becomes your ideal operational model—one that is highly connected and insight-driven.

Through an enterprise digital twin, you can compare your current and ideal state by assessing your agility, ideation, collaboration and ecosystem. It enables you to gain a real-time understanding of your entire enterprise and all of its activities by running scenarios, assessing impacts, viewing time dimensions and visualizing outcomes. This, in turn, delivers the insight you need to drive agility, innovation and change.

Key to the concept of an enterprise digital twin is changing how you view critical information. Critical information is truly critical, value linked, imperative linked and monitored for quality. It is the foundation for artificial intelligence, quality insights and effective decisions. Without it, it is impossible to build an agile operating model that enables you to effectively innovate and change.

Overall, to stay competitive, every enterprise faces the pressure to rethink its systems, tools, information, insights and metrics to compete in a world that is more dynamic, connected and innovative. If you reach the end of your digital transformation, or a large part of it, rethinking how you operate your business within a digital environment is key to your long-term success.

CGI works with clients in transitioning from digital transformation to agile operation. If you’d like to explore any of the concepts I’ve shared above in more detail, including our work in setting up enterprise digital twins, feel free to reach out to me.