Since before the appearance of Covid-19, the world and businesses were changing largely due to the revolution in information technologies. To face these changes, companies had to assume an agile attitude and environment to adapt and improve their value propositions for their customers. With the arrival of the Pandemic, this environment became even more uncertain than we could have imagined, and agility has become more necessary than ever. Now, all types of companies must reinvent themselves through implementation of digital technologies to improve their processes and performance if they want to survive.
Within this context, business agility is the ability of an organization to adapt quickly and efficiently to changes in its environment, also in an innovative and creative way, and thus be able to offer better products and services for satisfaction of their clients´ changing needs. Businesses that survive and strengthen in situations of instability and uncertainty like the current one are those that manage to be agile and flexible, thereby achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.
To achieve the objectives, business agility must be a constant in the organization, because changes are constant, so it must become a value of the organization. Therefore, it is necessary to involve the human factor in the change, promote communication and collaboration around objectives, processes, managers, etc. That is, creating agile teams through collaborative leadership, adapted to new work circumstances, such as remote work in many cases. In these new circumstances, companies need to create the conditions that allow their staff to undergo rapid cycles of learning and adaptation, empower them, give them the time and space so that they can innovate, test, adjust products and services.
Likewise, agile organizations must be structured around the generation of products and services of value to their clients, and not around their traditional departments or areas (finance, human resources, operations). We must not lose focus from the fact that these exist to support the satisfaction of customer needs. As new technologies transform the way organizations interact with their end users, they expect their opinions to be valued and for companies to respond quickly with improvements to their products and services, or they may change suppliers. To be successful then, you must be able to respond agilely to the changing needs of the market.
Due to all the above, it is evident that acquiring business agility entails various types of changes, including in the organization's processes, in the staff´s attitude, and in the adoption of new technologies that allow quick solutions to be set. To this end, these technologies must provide the skills and capabilities necessary to improve communication, collaboration, and integration between people of interest in organizations, allowing a comprehensive vision of the business and of its different areas, in real time, accessible from mobile devices, all of which is key to making decisions consistent with the value of business agility. Additionally, today, technological tools make it possible to implement information technology infrastructures in the cloud quickly and at low cost, since there is no need to physically have the hardware in the office.
Business agility involves a change in the organizational culture of the company, and in all its areas, being one of the most relevant in these times the adoption of new technologies that enable these changes, such as allowing work in short and incremental cycles, improving learning times, and leading to the delivery of products and services with increasingly greater value for the customer, who is its reason for being, and responding to the changing market demands.
