Join the Digital Agility Revolution

Digital agility is the ease with which an organization can rapidly enable, update, change, and adapt their processes. It’s a specific type of business agility that encompasses the processes, tools, and software an organization uses to perform basic business functions.

One aspect of digital agility includes the combination of technologies a company uses to build and run an application or project – in other words, your tech stack. To be digitally agile, these tools need to be flexible, dynamic, and easy-to-use. This enables your employees to easily transform existing processes during free time or quickly spin up new workflows in times of crisis.

Why is digital agility important?

We’re living during a time that demands rapid change, quick launches, and innovative solutions. So, work needs to be flexible, and systems should be easily adaptable.

Digital agility provides organizations with the power to rapidly develop, test, and launch new systems, processes, and workflows. What’s even better is that these new processes can be easily launched across departments or entire organizations.

Using the right tools gives you the power to create solutions in days instead of months. That’s why your tech stack is so important to digital agility. You can achieve milestones quickly and easily without overhauling everything at once.

Removing complicated tools, inefficient systems, and clunky software will transform not only the way employees work, but their level of satisfaction at work as well. Providing teams with the tools they need to get work done quickly, easily, and efficiently is key to success now and in the future.‍

What are the benefits of digitally agile tools?

Tools that are digitally agile are easy for all employees to access, understand, and use. With so many employees working from home, labor-intensive and time-consuming projects involving multiple stakeholders from different departments are difficult to accomplish. Your employees need to be able to work autonomously, without jumping through hoops to get work done.

This new breed of tools allows employees to be more in control of their work. When you remove common barriers from launching new products and processes, like needing IT or knowing how to code, you empower your employees to rapidly respond to issues, innovate, and find solutions faster.

When problems arise, teams are able to respond rapidly, saving time and money while minimizing stress. If an adjustment is needed in a process, employees are able to instantly deploy it. Digitally agile tools make it easy to update processes and optimize them over time to ensure efficiency, productivity, and profitability.

Is your business ready for digital agility?

Assessing digital readiness is critical to delivering an experience that resonates with all your stakeholders. And while there’s no one action you can take to ensure readiness, here are three ways industry leaders suggest to determine whether you have the right elements to be successful.

You know – really know – the UX your audiences want

How do you know what experience your audience wants from you? Unless your answer is through qualitative research, then you have work to do. Your stakeholders will tell you what they want and how they want to interact with you – if you listen to them. That means research. User surveys, interviews and workshops are fantastic ways to gather data. Google Analytics, heat maps and other tools can provide further context by revealing how clients interact with your existing digital assets. Armed with this information, you can develop stakeholder’s personas and journey maps to determine what your user really want and how they make decisions.
Your efforts are guided by a digital roadmap

Next, you need to know where you want to go and how you’ll get there. Naturally, your digital roadmap should be guided by the personas and journey maps you developed using qualitative research. And, it should be informed by looking one, three, and five years ahead and accompanied by an infrastructure plan that supports your vision.

Start with the outcomes that matter most and shape your tools from there. Doing so helps to ensure you invest in business goals rather than pursuing shiny digital toys. It will also keep your key performance indicators front and center so you can effectively measure ROI and prove the value of your efforts to stakeholders.
You have a digital champion

Distributing accountability for your digital roadmap across multiple functions is a sure-fire way to lose momentum. Instead, you need a champion with decision-making capacity and a seat at the table to head up your digital transformation strategy. By marrying the strategic and financial responsibilities with a single point of contact, you’ll have greater success developing a cohesive strategy, marshaling resources, and seeing your plan through.