Change the Way You Handle Change

Organizations have always had to adapt in order to stay relevant, but in today’s fast-paced market, change is more necessary than ever. The ‘Digital Enterprise’ requires major business transformations, delivered at speed. The ‘unfreeze-change-refreeze’ model, reasoning from a stable current to a desired future state, no longer applies. Organizations in the ‘New Normal’ are in a constant state of flux. How can you change the way you handle change?

A changing environment

Here are some of the challenges that organizations are facing today:

New technologies are disrupting the market every day
Globalization facilitates the entry of foreign organizations in your local market
Many old business models become obsolete
Customers expect high quality and personalized experiences
Social media can make or break your organization
Virtualization of assets
Markets are transparent
New players can disrupt markets at the blink of an eye

Many of these are new challenges that now show an exponential curve. This is not a temporary storm that will soon blow over. In fact, we can expect the storm to gain more force with each passing year. This has an enormous impact on organizations.

Diagram: SWOT analysis in Enterprise Studio

Impact on organizations

Every organization needs to adapt, but very few have a systematic and reliable way of translating their business strategy into action across all relevant elements of the organization. This requires top-down strategic guidance, but also bottom-up improvement, learning and feedback.

Of course many traditional organizations are strong. They have a strong name, strong reputation, strong brand and strong customer base. They can handle a ‘punch’ and deal with some change in time. However, if we look inside these organizations (and as a consultant, I have the privilege to gain insight into many organizations), we see they struggle to keep up with new developments. They are accustomed to taking their time to develop, launch and exploit their products or services. However, in an extremely competitive market, traditional structures and rules no longer apply.

Change the way you handle change

Organizations are forced to move much quicker than before. Change is no longer something that can be managed in traditional ways. Organizations need to be agile and adaptive. This requires a new vision on business transformation, supported by new capabilities and technology.

IT is evidently a big cause and driver for all challenges that organizations face. Isn’t it logical to also use the power of IT to support your change capability? Software functionality is developing from modeling and communication, to portfolio management, data integration, decision support and strategy execution. Digital business design software enables organizations to continuously adapt, by bringing together the right people, the right information and the right context.

A recent survey on business transformations among (N=554) shows that 84% of the participants expect software to become (very) important for business transformations. We believe a digital business design platform is inevitable for the adaptive enterprise.