Business agility

Business agility stands for the company’s ability to:

• Quickly adapt to various changes in the market, both internally and externally;
• Quickly and flexibly respond to ever changing customer requests and demands;
• Adapt to changes and leading them productively and effectively without negatively affecting quality;
• Stay at the company’s competitive advantage.

Sometimes business agility comes in the form of responding to a crisis, however companies may built it into the systems and enjoy tranquility in business storms.

Main concepts of business agility

There are 4 main concepts of business agility, as follows:

Interactions stand for interactions among people, both individuals and groups, who share the same values, same drive and goals for a long-term perspective. Interactions in a company happen in variety of forms, including meetings, brainstormings, discussions, etc. All these forms of interactions become one of the main drivers for innovative processes, vital for business agility.

Self-organising is about unexpected and not guided decision making process, which quite often leads to innovations.

Co-evolution is about growing and developing with customers and their needs. Co-evolution implies such development of products and services, where the company evolves continuously to meet market needs, which change constantly.

These concepts are vital for the company to remain at the edge of chaos. This is the area between normal equilibrium and randomness. Companies stay on the edge of chaos thanks to ability to adapt to changing environment with the help of self-organizing, interactions and co-evolution.

Business agility in HR

Agility affects not only business processes, but also HR functions. From an HR point of view, agility lies in making sure that employees are trained or have necessary skills to adapt to new developments and respond to changes. Companies should also set up their business processes and infrastructure in a way to efficiently mobilize people into action in times of changes.

Business agility can be supported by recent technology developments, like mobile devices, cloud computing, internal communication via collaboration solutions, social media and much more.

In such a context having a cloud based HR solution helps to gain scalability and flexibility in adjusting to changes and costs per user. HR management though cloud solutions, like PeopleForce, also allows for better security and independence of data from local infrastructure.