Emerging trends in technology: From agile to antifragile

In the introduction of his book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."

Businesses are being exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and uncertainty. They are facing radical changes in the current economic and market structures, and these changes are taking place faster than ever before. PwC's 16th this disruptive decade as the era of a ‘stable instability' where the risks that once seemed improbable and remote have become the norm. CEOs across the world have adopted ‘expect the unexpected' as their mantra. The only solution is to build organisations that can thrive amidst such disorder; organisations that are agile and accommodating will be able to cope with disruption and will eventually emerge stronger. The organisations in question will be ‘antifragile'.

An article titled ‘Transformers' published by PwC suggests that the first step towards an enterprise transformation in this changing world is to do away with its legacy IT systems. The complexity in technology infrastructures of most enterprises limits the possibility of rolling out new products and services as well as expanding into new markets in time. It also makes it difficult to effectively respond to customer demands adopt the emerging technologies. If left unchecked, such a complexity will lead to burdensome management, slow responses and extremely high costs which will affect business agility. This negative impact on the agility will render the organisations crippled. For the enterprises that have been involved in mergers and acquisitions, the picture is a little more complex. Thus, the fact that around 70% of an enterprise's IT budget is spent on the ongoing support and maintenance with almost nothing left for innovation doesn't come as a surprise.

As organisations strive to become ‘antifragile', they must consider emerging technologies and plan for strategic investments in those. We believe that a company that continuously adopts technology, masters it and accordingly drives business integration is likely to have a much more sustainable advantage over its peers in the market.

A change in the economic and business landscape is not a new phenomenon. We have witnessed a similar incident a decade ago, when the forces of globalisation and e-business, among others, led to the remodeling of the business enterprise as we know today: the extended virtual enterprise. In order to get through the current changing environment, it is very important for an organisation to capitalise on SMAC which translates to the following four technologies - social networking, mobile computing, analytics and cloud computing.

While each of these technologies is unique, they also complement each other and act as catalysts in driving business transformation. Social media defines ‘who we work with' and enables collaboration as well as communication with the employees and the customers. Mobile devices create the platform of ‘where we work', providing anytime anywhere access to the applications stored within the cloud and other data sources. Analytics identifies ‘what we work on' and helps us make constructive sense of the available data. Cloud suggests ‘how we do the work' and contains the information and applications that people will use. Together, these technologies foster innovation and drive business Annual Global CEO Survey report highlights this fact by terming agility through new and innovative ways of product development, customer services and interaction, partnerships. This, in return, creates value and stimulates success.

Enterprises can utilise social media channels to crowd source ideas from their consumers as well as their employees and co-create products and services based on these ideas or feedback in a cost effective manner. This is all the more important in times like these, when the consumer preference changes each day. Proper listening strategies can ensure a better connect with the consumers, fuel innovation and foster growth through the products or services that directly addresses the consumer needs. Mobile devices can provide an effective platform to engage and interact with the consumers as well as employees. Instead of using these devices as mere tools for accessing applications, enterprises will have to utilise these devices to create an ecosystem that will transform and positively influence the consumer and employee experience. Businesses are flooded with data today. This data is generated from multiple sources; most of them are non-traditional and are growing exponentially. 

Such datasets, referred to as big data are too unstructured and too raw for analysis using the traditional relational data analysis tools. However, if effectively analysed, this information can provide the enterprises insights into the pulse of the consumer demand and trends. Big data analytics technologies like Hadoop are the smart way to go. Enterprises can utilise these technologies in order to differentiate and create a competitive advantage. Leading organisations are now realising that cloud computing is far more than just a mere sophisticated IT solution. It is, in fact, a better business solution. Cloud computing has the potential to simplify IT, thus making time and resources available for innovation, reduce the costs by leveraging scalable on-demand resources, streamline internal operations and improve business agility by reducing the time-to-market.

A comprehensive enterprise technology strategy combining all the elements of SMAC will become a critical competitive requirement for all businesses. While the emerging technologies have the potential to drive innovation, without a structured approach and a well-defined strategy even the best technologies cannot guarantee success. There isn't any solution that caters to all the problems that may arise. Enterprises will have to formulate their strategy keeping in mind the manner in which they wish to organise with respect to innovation and by carefully identifying which technologies are best suited to their specific requirements.

For enterprises to become ‘antifragile' the organisational and corporate culture will have to be worked on and new models of governance will have to be explored. The crucial decision of formulating the enterprise technology strategy cannot be taken by the CIO alone. It has to be a collaborative decision of the various C-suite members. According to PwC's 5th at nurturing strong collaborations between the CIO and the other C-suite members are four times likely to be the top performers as compared to the ones that have less collaboration. This will require a major shift from the conservative mindset of being comfortable with the status quo rather than embracing new technologies. Most importantly, enterprises need to integrate ‘antifragility' into the fabric of their corporate culture.

Keeping up with the constantly changing business environment may seem daunting and even impossible in a lot of cases. However, businesses that manage to accordingly improve and develop, will have unique opportunities to truly transform their organisations in the process and will emerge even better and stronger than before.

With inputs from Ritesh Pal, Senior Consultant, Advisory, PwC India