Technology is a critical driver in today’s world, affecting how people deliver their work in the rapidly changing business landscape. Business models which did not seem feasible a few years ago are now commonplace. Goods and services are being rapidly delivered at the tap of a finger! In this promising yet challenging landscape, technologically ready and organizationally agile companies have thrived. Educational institutions that train students to “learn how to learn” have excelled, and countries that have adapted digitization at scale have developed rapidly (The Digital India Initiative has made India the fastest-growing major economy).
Organizations must train their personnel to be agile in this ever-evolving landscape. But how can this goal be achieved? In this blog series, we will explain the process of achieving organizational agility step-by-step.
An easily forgotten fact is that stability is the inverse of innovation.
How often do we see large, stable, highly profitable organizations experience disruption due to newer and smaller competitors? Kodak, a well-known photography company, is an example of an organization that failed to adapt and lost its agility. Despite being one of the pioneers in inventing digital cameras, Kodak failed to capitalize on its own innovation due to the fear of losing the camera film market. Today, Kodak barely exists.
An important reason behind such a phenomenon is that large and stable organizations feel too comfortable. Their employees work in silos, often duplicating work done by their peers. These organizations perceive change as a threat rather than as an opportunity.
On the other hand, smaller organizations face problems related to shifting markets. Startups, for example, are often cash-poor and work on shoestring budgets. Often, technology landscape shifts result in making newly-launched Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) redundant. For instance, Kite, a startup applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate coding productivity, lost years of hard work to technologies like Github Copilot and AWS CodeWhisperer.
Educational institutions play a significant role in developing a skilled, agile workforce. Instead of focusing on developing skills, these institutions need to foster a culture of “learning how to learn”. For agility in organizations, young graduates should be able to leverage their “training” to pick up knowledge in different fields faster and make significant contributions.
Countries need to build government institutions with minimum silos and bureaucracy. Government employees need to work with a vision, cross-collaborate with different departments and understand how to leverage technology to provide last-mile delivery of governance and civil services effectively. Unfortunately, the “job stability” at government institutions turns counterproductive. Society needs to understand that poor governance can lead to a loss in the standard of living.
How can institutions adapt to accelerated change?
To develop an agile organizational structure, institutions need to:
- Engage their personnel
- Break silos/cross collaborate
- Encourage thinking out of the box
- Enable adaptation of new technologies for day-to-day work
This change can be brought about by systematically conducting themed Hackathons, Ideation, and Innovation events.
Here is how these events work at a high level:
- Themed Hackathons: Hackathons aim to boost employee engagement and develop innovation-driven proof of concepts (PoCs) that can be developed further. Businesses can adapt market-oriented hackathon themes. For example, a media company can host a hackathon to determine the right GenAI technology they can leverage to create content faster and better.
Business leaders can give market-relevant problem statements. Participants can develop time-bound (24/48hrs) PoCs that leverage different AI technologies. Judging rounds can be held where teams demo their solutions and winners can be declared. Industry should encourage participation from educational institutions for hackathons. Collaboration creates a win-win situation for both – students gain invaluable industry experience, while the industry gets to identify and evaluate potential future hires. - Ideation events: These events aim to bring out next-generation business ideas from within an organizational framework. The organizations can incentivize the employees to submit their ideas and a business plan. Best ideas can be selected by a jury panel and funded for commercialization.
- Innovation events: These events are a step forward from Ideation. The ideas that are declared winners in an Ideation initiative can be taken on and developed into MVPs in a time-bound manner. Teams can create to develop market-worthy MVPs in a timeline of 2 to 6 weeks. Developed MVPs can be pitched to clients for business success thereafter.
How can Persistent Systems help you drive a culture of organizational agility?
At Persistent Systems, we have multiple years of external and internal experience in program managing the above events. We have successfully engaged with industry, academic and government institutions to undertake various large-scale events. We also provide an enabler tool called PiBox that can be used to manage events, provide inbuilt sandboxes (VMs, PiCloud, Blockchain and more), datasets/APIs for PoC development, and efficiently manages workflows.
If you want to drive organizational agility and need expert help, talk to us today.
