The business environment is changing fast. In many organisations, competing products and services are popping up overnight and they threaten to shake up existing markets. Yet, often our processes feel 'hard-baked' -- it feels like we need major projects and programmes to get any kind of change implemented.
It is often said that we live in a fast-moving world, where the pace of change is increasing. Dominant titans of industry are challenged by nimble start-up firms that utilize technological and social resources in ways that in previous years would have seemed impossible. All of this plays out in an increasingly globalized world where political, economic and environmental factors in one part of the world can have a serious (negative or positive) knock-on effect elsewhere. Successful organizations, both new and established, continue to innovate and react to changes in their business environments. They constantly scan their market and the wider domain trying to predict what might happen in future. They assess their internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as the external opportunities and threats, and plan how they will sail through the choppy and often uncharted water! This requires a high level of innovation, coupled with the ability and desire to keep processes and propositions ‘fresh’ and relevant for the customer. As Brad Power observed in the Harvard Business Review back in 2012:
“With accelerating changes in technology, competition, regulation, and globalization, so too has the half-life of any business process.” (Power in HBR, 2012)
As you would expect, this consistent commitment to staying relevant requires a significant level of flexibility and adaptability. In this eBook we examine how to build adaptability into an organization’s business processes so that they can be kept fresh, and so that they stay truly aligned with the customer’s needs, wants and demands. In doing so, we might find that regular analysis of our processes become a conduit for the very innovation that is needed to keep the organization at the forefront of its industry
In this paper, Adrian Reed outlines ideas for keeping our processes 'fresh', adaptable and ready to adapt in a changing world. Login to continue reading and download the ebook.
