Why an Agile Process is Great for Digital Transformation

By: Kuntal Shah, Director Sales Engineering, India and SAARC, Avaya

Agility is imperative to the success of any business looking at successfully competing in a rapidly changing environment. The aim for all of us is to become an organization that can respond to new opportunities or competitive threats as quickly and effectively as possible. Organizations that are unable to change quickly are the ones bound to be slow to capturing market shifts and face the threat of becoming irrelevant.

The agile process in technology is an emerging approach that enterprises are adopting to introduce new applications for the digital age. This includes the quick consulting and assessment of whether a solution works for the organization or not, designing the solution, testing it to fail or hopefully succeed as quickly and cost effectively as possible. By following this process to applications design and adoption enterprise wide, agility delivers a significantly lower risk and investment of time and resources while the gain of experience or learning is key to improvement.

With this process, the months that it would generally take a team to build a solution are minimized to weeks if not days. The major challenge and I would say also an opportunity when following an agile process to application development and consumption is consensus. Not only the needs for customized applications for organizations vary based on their business, but their needs become even more specific when you go down to the business unit level and a country or culture level to name a few. Achieving consensus early in the process from the involved business units or countries not only enables you to design the right solution for the right team, but also minimize the times you go wrong, and achieve financial buy-in from your internal stakeholders from the get go. This makes total sense: an agile organization ultimately empowers its local units and geographies to be more responsive and adapt to local customer trends, creating the right mix of bureaucracy with nimbleness and innovation.

Moving businesses to the digital age by adopting an agile process is only made possible if your technology platform has three characteristics: open, modular and easily extensible. Your platform should support the design, creation and deployment of advanced applications, without developers having to acquire specialized communications expertise. By being open, the platform will be much easier for your organization to leverage and integrate with virtually any third-party data and applications. Being modular means the platform allows you to select a range of capabilities over time to meet your company’s goals and initiatives and drive business results that will change over time. Extensible means having a platform on which your organization can expand and adapt as your business changes, shaping new, innovative and differentiated customer and employee experiences, as well as accommodating new and future requirements.

The agile process is a great new approach to deliver on your digital transformation objectives and that of your peers within the organization. It has evolved to be a proven successful approach to change by taking small cost effective steps for trial and error as the world around us continuously moves the goal post.