Industry Thought Leadership

The only constant in life is change. Nothing has rung more true to that than the recent years, largely in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has plunged the world into one of its worst global recessions. And while it seems that the business landscape is changing faster than ever before, the rise in digitalization has long been hinting at the urgency for businesses to prepare for the future.

Without collaboration, an advanced and consistently developing marketplace would be an impossibility. Companies across industries rely on the products, services and capabilities produced by other organizations to accomplish tasks that are as challenging as maintaining cloud infrastructure or as ubiquitous as receiving shipments. Changing consumer needs, combined with shifting workforce expectations, are altering the competitive landscape and dictating the transformation of existing company operating models for the companies. These companies are facing wholesale change—from defining how technology reinvents entire functions to how the organization manages new workforce models to unlock value with cross-industry ecosystems.

As the Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated, businesses can't predict the future entirely. Growing a business often requires keeping up with the latest industry trends, including technology. Digitization, connectivity, and virtualization are bringing revolutionary new opportunities to companies and taking them beyond all the traditional limits. Moreover, the global economic upheaval has impacted companies across the globe and shown that no business or solution or can ever indeed be future proof. So now is the right time to focus on being 'future-ready, establishing new business models to deal with current and future challenges. To accelerate business results, for today's B2B companies, organizations should adopt a model that recommends a shift in focus to three key dimensions, all infused with intelligence, namely efficiencies, experiences, and innovation.

The path to becoming future-ready is not necessarily linear. Even stable organizations can accelerate their journeys by moving up more than one maturity level. Adding intelligence to the journey by applying a strategic approach to advancing the operating model and transforming the business through technology, processes, and people.

Companies can gain a competitive advantage and agility by being future-ready. The journey begins here and now. Within the last decade, the emphasis on being future-ready has shifted to coincide with the rise in digitalization. From automation, big data to artificial intelligence (AI) technology, businesses that embraced digitalization are better equipped to deal with the potential challenges of the future.

A flexible operational model—an optimum blend of interdisciplinary teams and on-demand technologies that function across a large ecosystem of partners—is required to be future-ready. The objective is to deliver excellent business outcomes on a large scale from anywhere, at any time.

Here are a few solutions for future readiness.

ICT as a Service for Enterprises – shift from CapEx to OpEx
With everything in business, the ultimate question is always, "What's the bottom line here? What is this going to cost us?"

Traditionally, companies relied on in-house models for data centers that required a huge CapEx investment as they purchased space, equipment, software, and a workforce to run and maintain everything. Hence, Cloud provides opportunities to reduce capital and operational expenditure, improve service quality and responsiveness through automation, scale digital aspects of the business efficiently and drive business innovation with emerging tech. Cloud Computing enables CapEx (Capital Expenditure) savings as businesses no longer need to invest in costly infrastructure. When it comes to cloud ROI, comparing capital expenses (CapEx) to operational expenses (OpEx) reveals the Cloud is a great way to switch IT spending to a pay-as-you-go model and reduce CapEx costs, as well as reap other benefits.

Reimagining the Role of Technology
Today, we live in a dynamic and turbulent global community. The wave of mega-trends, including rapid change in globalization and technological advances, is creating new market forces. The technology service industry has grown quickly, but the decade ahead is likely to see even more growth as companies of all kinds recognize the imperative of digital transformation. For any organization to survive and prosper in such an environment, innovation is imperative. A pool of Technology services addressing the different needs of enterprises in the future. It's time to turbocharge the operations by reviewing existing practices that may no longer serve the business. Enterprises may need to start integrating new processes to reap the exponential benefits that cloud computing, and AI has to offer.

Innovation for value creation
The service industry addressing B2B is future proof since customers can change the service every year. As technology becomes the catalyst for business strategy and transformation, the lines between business and technology functions are blurring, and the expectations of IT are shifting, leading many organizations to reimagine the role of technology and rethink traditional operating models and organizational structures. To maximize the value of technology investments, companies must operate with agility, predict and respond to customer and employee needs, remain competitive, and drive shareholder value, companies should fuse together separate business and technology strategies into a single unified strategy. This can require a new approach that enables business and technology functions to partner and co-create new sources of value, including data, agility, speed, transparency, and digital experiences. With technology as the catalyst, organizations have the opportunity to either disrupt and transform—or fall behind.

Augment human talent with technology
By fostering a human-machine workforce where technology helps people (not the other way around). The workforce will then be able to engage in more creative and critical thinking, which is the unique approach to discovering new sources of value. More than one-third (34%) of future-ready firms have implemented a large-scale agile workforce strategy. As a result, they can tap into ecosystem partners to mobilize people with special skills as needed.

Conclusion
Companies must be quick to market with agile, disruptive solutions so they can continually understand what customers need. Technology operating model agility remains to be imperative. As technology and business leaders consider the immense task of creating an ecosystem in which co-creation and innovation thrive, they can begin both by reimagining what technology can do for the business and viewing technology as an opportunity to enable business disruption and create sustainable competitive advantage. To achieve enterprise agility, businesses optimize how they organize and structure technology work and operate. At the intersection of these two dimensions is enterprise agility, where businesses behave in a more agile manner.