Keeping businesses relevant in today’s volatile and globally hyper-connected world, where the technology fuelled disruption of entire markets and industries alike, presents a real and ongoing challenge for business leaders.
The simultaneous impacts of factors such as the speed of technology-induced change and globalisation further accelerate these changes.
Established organisations whose business models are predicated on the assumption that a fine tuning of their current strategies, structures and business processes will guarantee future viability may be ill prepared when faced with the inevitability of disruption.
20/20 hindsight is a good thing. The litany of cases where organisations have failed to read the signs of disruption are well known and researched. Kodak and Polaroid are well known such examples.
The question is: What can business leaders do to ensure their organisation thrives and survives in the face of increasing technology-induced volatility?
The inertial organisation meets disruption: Who wins?
All organisations, whether public, private, for-profit, not-for-profit or Government, intrinsically face the same challenges in ensuring their ongoing financial viability and efficiency whilst remaining relevant and valued in the eyes of their stakeholders.
Even though the latest technology offering may be compelling, the acid test is how, if at all, organisations can exploit these technologies and innovations to their advantage with known cost, value and risk. This tests the organisation’s intrinsic ability to truly deliver when it comes to making the necessary changes – not everyone will come out a winner.
Past successes contribute to organisational inertia, and overcoming this inertia presents business owners and executives with a complex set of challenges. For incumbent and mature organisations, the foundations on which the capability for ensuring enterprise-wide resilience and adaptability has often little to do with the latest technology.
This post first appeared on CIO Upfront by Rob Livingstone (CIO New Zealand)
