The Importance of Data to an Adaptive Business Strategy
Businesses around the world are having to adapt to a “new normal” way of working in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, and those that can react quickly in today’s rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain world will be the most successful.
Gartner published an interesting report which suggests that an adaptive business strategy is feasible for any business as long as it follows four core practices “designed to move the enterprise from a rigid, top-down, calendar-based process to a more adaptive, event-driven strategy approach.”
These practices aren’t intended to replace a company’s existing strategy approach, but can guide business leaders to modify their procedures for the digital world, and encourage organizations to view strategy “as a continuous learning activity instead of a one-off planning exercise.”
With that in mind, here are the four suggested core principles your business should follow …
1 – Early execution
The first thing you must do when applying an adaptive business strategy is to do it as early as possible, so it doesn’t quickly become out of date. You don’t want to be in a situation where you have spent weeks coming up with a plan, and by the time you’re ready to implement it, the strategy has become redundant. The need for speed is paramount to ensure organizations are one step ahead of their competitors.
For instance, those businesses that reacted quickly to the COVID-19 crisis by implementing and setting up home working, accelerating technology adoption and innovation across the organization, were more likely to have a productive and engaged workforce at the height of the pandemic.
2 – Respond to changes regularly
It’s not uncommon for organizations to review strategy quarterly or even monthly, as reports and insights take time to build, but could your enterprise make the change to more regular reviews of your business model? Companies that conduct frequent evaluations are better poised to be truly adaptive and reactive, initiating a strategy review whenever new information comes to light. In fact, a recent survey conducted with Forrester backed this up, reporting that Domo-enabled decision-makers drove an additional $5.3 million in net profit by tapping into the real-time insights on the dashboard.
3 – Embrace uncertainty and risk
COVID-19 is a once-in-a-lifetime event, but other global economic issues—whether that be political unrest or environmental disasters—affect businesses all the time, and those that deal with these threats poorly, with bad leadership and delayed action, will struggle to weather future storms. Organizations that embrace risk and respond quickly will thrive in the future.
Take the healthcare industry as an example. Amid the pandemic, the Digital Innovation and Consumer Experience (DICE) Group at Jefferson Health, a US-based hospital network, launched a range of data-led solutions to deal with the crisis, including developing online clinical training, helping to scale-up telehealth offerings, and developing systems for tracking COVID-19 exposure and symptoms. Each initiative was designed to protect patients and healthcare providers from unnecessary virus exposure, share data and knowledge internally, and keep the health system adequately staffed and supplied with critical resources throughout the pandemic.
4 – Involve the whole organization
It takes more than just one person to develop an effective business strategy, and the more ideas, the better. Involving people from across the business is more likely to bring about a quality plan, and encouraging collaboration and inclusivity in an organization will also help make people feel more involved and respected.
These four principles will enable your business to become less rigid and begin to implement a continuously adaptive business strategy in a post-pandemic world.
Of course, it is up to individual businesses to implement an adaptive business strategy in a way that best works for them. For some enterprises, the commitment to change may not be strong enough, so the strategy ends up taking too long to execute. If this is the case, it might be easier to cherry-pick one of the four core principles to start with and see how you get on.
Organizations will only fully realize the benefits of an adaptive business approach if they respond quickly to changing strategic priorities. Domo can help enterprises build an intelligent data ecosystem to improve internal data utilization, providing invaluable insights into what strategies are working and which are not.
