Key Points

• Business agility is a fantastic way of promoting adaptability in your organization.
• Digital tools can aid in promoting agility and continued success.
• Communication is paramount for a business’s success.

What tools are needed to create business agility? An agile business can adapt and roll with the punches. I don’t mean a momentary setback but events that a business can easily adapt and overcome. In software development, this methodology is known as Agile and is one of the driving forces behind modern development teams.

However, regardless of your industry, you can adopt the same principles in your organization. You might already have the tools in place. At any rate, there are a few key pillars to discuss on how to make the most of your business and increase its overall agility. We’ll define what makes for an agile business, and show why you might want to consider doing this at your organization.

What Is Business Agility?

Business agility isn’t too dissimilar to the normal concept of agility. We characterize agility as someone with plenty of mobility, like a gymnast or ballerina. The same principles can and are applied to businesses around the world when it comes to how businesses navigate things coming their way.

Consider some sort of shortcoming, like a supplier losing a shipment of raw materials, that would grind things to a halt, right? This doesn’t have to be the case if your company can adapt, overcome, and ultimately succeed.

At its core, business agility isn’t necessarily about being fleet-footed but rather about taking a closer look at the means of fostering a culture that thrives on the unpredictable. There isn’t a set approach that works for every company, but I’ll talk a little further about measures you can take.

Growing Trends

When the Agile development methodology was introduced, I remember wondering how long it would be until I saw it making ground in my system and network administration field. Sure enough, maybe a year or so after I saw the first murmurs, we were holding stand-up meetings, communicating, and responding far more ably than we were in the previous fiscal year.

This trend continues to mark the progress of businesses. Dynamicism is one of the key tenets of any successful business. However, it can be difficult to implement, especially if you’re at an organization with a fully entrenched corporate culture that dates back decades.

At the end of the day, a business’s means of overcoming challenges is what sets it apart from the rest of its competitors. This is one of those waves you might want to catch before you’re left in the dust.

Tools for Driving Business Agility

There are quite a few tools at your disposal for promoting business agility. These are primarily digital tools, which we’ll cover to some extent. There are numerous platforms that ultimately all accomplish the same general thing. What it comes down to more is your organization’s needs when it comes to considering and selecting digital tools.

As such, think of this as more of a general guide to the sorts of digital tools that are driving business agility and promoting growth. As I mentioned earlier, there isn’t a concrete game plan like you would have for implementing Lean Six Sigma or implementing something like Kaizen across the board.

However, the tools discussed can very easily allow your organization to pivot into a more responsive, adaptive, and ultimately dynamic organization that is ready for whatever challenges it may face.

Communication Tools

One of the big considerations when it comes to business agility is communication. Think about it for a moment. If something truly catastrophic has happened, is a company that takes a day or two to respond going to truly come out of something unscathed? Communication is vital in the modern era, from the top to the very bottom of your employees.

When considering tools to drive business agility, you might want to take a closer look at digital communication tools. Software packages like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Citrix give your teams the means to communicate effectively, regardless of their current location.

Further, if you’re in an organization that promotes hybrid or remote workflow, then communication is vital. This will allow your team to conduct standup meetings, have conferences, and more effectively communicate your organization’s current standing in the moment, rather than in the aftermath.

Digital Platforms for Work

This doesn’t apply to all industries, but there is something to be said about having a space to work. Virtual platforms for work are growing in prevalence. Google, Microsoft, and others all provide cloud-hosted spaces for you to spin up platforms for work. Why you’d want to consider a virtual space is it gives rise to two notions: continuity and flexibility. In the event of something like the loss of a workstation, the work isn’t truly lost.

Further, it’s flexible exactly because it allows your remote employees and those on business trips to handle work while out of the office. This certainly wouldn’t apply to something like manufacturing, at least not across the board. However, for many industries, this is a great way to provide the collaborative environment of an office while being at home.

An additional benefit is that your workplace could potentially save on expenses. Renting office space is incredibly expensive, something that is unlikely to change anytime soon. We’re slowly starting to see modern businesses emerge with little more than a token brick-and-mortar presence, while still getting the work done.

Customer Outreach

Businesses live and die by their customers, that’s just a simple fact of life. However, if you’re still relying on the likes of committees, user surveys, and so forth to build marketing campaigns, you’re missing out. Digital tools like Semrush, KNIME Analytics, and Spark allow companies to mine massive troves of data and keywords to see where user interest is lying.

Further, you can leverage tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and others to help write the ad copy. This isn’t a complete solution for having dedicated marketing teams on your staff. However, it does take a bit of the legwork out and get you focusing on making sales.

A marketing department that has fully embraced digital business agility is going to react to trends as they happen, rather than trying to cash in far too late. When you consider the pace of social media these days, it pays to heed trends as they happen.

Automation

Automation gets a bad rap. At its core, this helps take the tedium out of your workers’ lives. Think about it, do you think an employee wants to sit and sort individual sales reports by hand into Excel? Probably not. This eats up time and morale, and honestly, your employees could be better served doing more specialized work.

Automation cuts out the boring stuff, easing the tedium, and allows employees to get back to work. There is no shortage of tools and programming languages that can help with automation. An AI chatbot could sort customer complaints into the right ticketing section of your customer support pipeline. You could have basic scripts that sanitize sales reports and present them in an organized spreadsheet.

At its core, automation is such a dense subject that I could easily spend the rest of the article discussing it. Instead, I suggest that you look into areas of work in your business that could benefit from automation. It might surprise you to see the results.

Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping is one of those areas that gets sadly underrepresented when considering business agility. However, having the funds on hand to handle things is paramount for the operation of any modern business. Thankfully, there are quite a few platforms that take the guesswork out of bookkeeping and let you focus on what matters.

Tools like Refrens and Shoeboxed take some of the legwork out of doing your bookkeeping, automatically categorizing the likes of business expenses. Modern tools also aid in the generation of financial reports and come in handy during tax season.

You can’t do anything in a business without money, so keeping a close eye on your organization’s liquidity is a great way to continue promoting business agility.

Training

For those in the tech industry, digital tools for training are already commonplace. However, for those in other industries, this might be exactly what you need to get even more business agility in your organization. There isn’t a unified platform or tool readily available for training in the workplace.

This is one area where you’ll have to spin up your own. That said, there are some intrinsic benefits to providing digital training platforms. You’re guaranteeing your employees are getting the hands-on education needed to function in your organization.

Further, when combined with project management software like Trello or Asana, you’ve got a massive amount of power in your hands. These tools enable far more business agility as you’re able to leverage your training materials in a timely fashion, like before the launch of an extensive project.

Analysis

One area that certainly deserves highlighting for business agility is your data analysis. Businesses live and bleed data, at least in the modern era. As such, having the means to handle your data in a timely fashion is worth it. Essentially, you’ll want to consider using old standbys like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access.

Additionally, tools like Tableau are a great way of visualizing your data. Getting raw lists of data is fine and dandy. However, when you consider that you need to present these elements to leadership, it needs to be in a format you can decipher.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Business agility is a fantastic way of making your company prepared for the future. As such, you might want to consider the differences between big data and small data. These two data types are the lifeblood of the modern organization and are likely to drive future decisions as you move forward.

Additionally, considering pivoting to a data-driven culture is a fantastic way to promote business agility. Data-driven culture is one of the prevailing approaches to businesses as we move toward the next decade, and learning how to foster this culture is a means of continued success.

Conclusion

Business agility is the driving force behind many of the world’s top organizations. Taking the time to integrate some of the tools described today is the first step you can take. Don’t get left in the dust by your competitors, become agile.

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