Achieving business agility with AWS

Organizational agility is an increasingly used term in business and nowadays is one of the top priorities for companies aiming to innovate and be on top of their markets.

Business agility is the ability of an organization to adapt to market changes quickly, respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demand, and be continuously at a competitive advantage.

It produces positive outcomes for the organization’s health and performance. This requires eliminating waste in organizations, e.g., time-consuming processes with limited outcomes and effectiveness.

The backbone of becoming agile is creating stability in your organization to enable your organisation to respond quickly to fast changing conditions while reinventing and applying new business models.

• What does agility in IT consist of?
• How can you make your organization more agile?
• How does the AWS cloud support organizational agility?

This blog examines these topics to guide you to a more agile organization in the cloud.

Why is organizational agility essential?

Agile organizations are different than traditional organizations. They are characterized by networks of teams that operate in rapid learning and decision-making cycles. But why is organizational agility essential for businesses nowadays? Here, I will outline the main benefits of becoming agile.

Staying ahead of competitors

Being agile allows you to increase time to market and to respond to fast-changing external environments. This enables you to stay ahead of competitors and contributes to your business's resilience.

Increased flexibility and early return on investment (ROI)

Working agile enables you to gain insights into your return on investment (ROI) far quicker than working traditionally. This allows you to learn quickly and adapt. This results in an earlier ROI than in traditional ways of working.

Meeting target group demand

Agile enables you to meet customer demand because you can quickly test your ideas and learn and tweak them as you go. No need to say more about this. This is what every organization is aiming for, right?

Risk reduction

Agile is risk management. By continuously delivering and receiving feedback, the risk is significantly reduced.

Overall organizational efficiency

Agile workflows lead to the reduction of waste and contribute to organizational efficiency. Working agile helps you eliminate useless processes and focus on building products and services that work for your target groups.

Creating stability in the organization

Last but not least, working agile creates stability in organizations. As mentioned above, stability is the backbone of agility. Agile promises the creation of teams of empowered individuals with a sense of purpose, transparent workflows, and groups of people working hard towards shared and clearly defined goals.

Research by McKinsey shows that organizational agility is on the rise and becoming essential. The world is changing quickly, and business environments are increasingly complex and volatile. The need to work more agile is top of mind in most industries.

According to McKinsey’s research, the more unstable business environments are, the more inclined organizations are to transform to a more agile way of working. In today’s challenging and unstable environment with a rampant pandemic, becoming agile seems inevitable for most organizations.

However, to date, few organization-wide agile transformations have been completed. Organizations often tend to apply agile working methods to activities closest to their customers or users. This is no surprise since customer centricity is often one of the top reasons organizations transform ways of working.

Companies have higher aspirations to become agile, especially when responding to current challenges. Dynamic practices enable companies to respond to rapidly changing business environments. If you are not working on it, becoming more agile should be one of your top priorities.

IT agility

In the ever-evolving world of technology, responding quickly to market changes is essential. This isn't easy, but an important task for your organization to stay on top of the market. Above, we have already defined the growing importance of agility in organizations. But what is IT agility? IT agility measures how quickly and effectively your IT infrastructure can respond to external triggers and create opportunities. IT agility should be approached not as a task that can be ticked off but rather as an overall mindset that eventually becomes part of the company culture and enables you to keep innovating. This requires a well-architected IT infrastructure, taking full advantage of the company resources, and a change of mindset.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud helps you become more agile

Cloud technology helps organizations to become more agile and increase their time to market. Agile organizations require agile and modern technology to keep up with the fast-changing world. Here is how the AWS cloud contributes to the agility of your organization.

Automation

Automation is one of the main benefits of using the AWS cloud. Automation saves time on repetitive manual tasks, eliminates human errors, and ensures a consistent IT infrastructure. This saves you time, human resources, and effectively money, so you can focus on the things that really matter within your business.

Scalability made simple

One of the benefits of using the AWS cloud is that it offers many scaling options and on-demand scalability services. This makes it easier for organizations to respond to increased demand and scale it down immediately when necessary.

Numerous IT services to make your life easier

AWS offers an extensive set of global cloud-based IT products, including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, internet of things (IoT), security, and enterprise applications. All these tools are created to help organizations move faster and reduce costs.