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 For
as long as business has existed, people involved in it have been
subjected to the whims of the economy. The only constant in business
has been 'change' and economic uncertainty has been just another
day at office for all those who ever thought of financial success.
Ergo, pervasive market fluctuations and economic volatility are
here, and here to stay.
An interesting research in the recent past
threw up mind-boggling statistics. Of the total companies in the
1955 Fortune 500 list, 70 per cent are now out of business, and
of those listed in 1979, 40 per cent no longer exist as corporate
entities.
This trend is widely seen across the world.
Today, if corporations are being formed before one can blink one's
eye, almost as many are being shut down daily. Big corporate names
of yesterday are either shutting shop or are on the brink of closure
and bankruptcies. If a third of the Fortune 500 companies of 1970
can disappear by 1983 and the average life span is decreasing by
the day, there is little wonder that smaller companies are also
feeling the pinch.
At the core of the problem lies not just the
lack of sustainable business plans. It's a larger issue. It is the
result of organisations' inability to change: To evolve, to accept
challenges and to seek new avenues of growth. To be big and strong
is one thing, to be evolving with the times, is a totally another.
So, it is the capability of an organisation
to re-engineer, transform and adjust to the rapidly changing business
environment that separates the boys from the men or the haves from
the have-beens. Building adaptive capabilities that will enable
an organisation to 'move with the market' is the call of the day.
Focussing on understanding the end-to-end value chain to ensure
that the highest adaptive benefit opportunities are identified,
seeking the 'right' level of adaptiveness for the company-affordable,
meaningful, and feasible, not over-engineering solutions beyond
the point of diminishing returns, injecting new connective technologies
in and around legacy systems to accelerate adaptiveness, supporting
alternative processes, technology and organisational models across
the enterprise and treating this adaptation as a multi-year journey
that will require continuous testing and learning, rather than as
a 'big bang' event, are some of the ways in which organisations
can make themselves survive unpredictable changes in the market.
IT-enabled web services, intelligent agents
and event-driven processing permit companies to achieve flexibility,
responsiveness and intelligent automation. Building adaptive infrastructure
is important to improving the agility of the business by making
connections happen quickly, securely and effectively. Key principles
include an infrastructure strategy based on flexibility and freedom
of action, an approach that builds on current investment and a focus
on adaptiveness in systems and applications development.
Success in uncertain times requires enterprises
to climb onto a platform for change. An adaptive it infrastructure
makes it much easier to deal with an unpredictable future. Most
organisations today find their activities constrained by the limited
functionality of their applications; a problem aggravated by the
cost of trying to connect them in an application-driven world. Processes
must be integrated and streamlined across the entire ecosystem.
What is needed, hence, is a fundamental shift
in focus-from applications to architecture. An adaptive infrastructure
abstracts the processes from applications so that users need only
be presented with the tasks required. Such an infrastructure also
integrates seamlessly with all elements of the ecosystem; providing
transparent access to shared processes and information, as well
as providing a platform for increased collaboration within organisations.
Adaptive organisations revolve around dynamic
real-time processes: Performed anywhere and any time using adaptive
solutions. An organisation's operating teams may be dynamic and
effective, but market conditions are beyond one's control and they
do not look likely to rebound. One must, therefore, adjust and adapt,
and defy the economy.
The author is the COO, Asia Pacific,
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. The views expressed here are his own and
not those of his company.
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