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“I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.” – Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
While it may have been a play on words when Jack Worthington said those words to his aunt in the famous Oscar Wilde comedy, (spoiler: his real name was Ernst), the importance of being agile is no laughing matter, especially for enterprises. As we are living in an age where disruption is the trend and revolutions in industries are a given, companies need to be able to adapt to change – even before they know it is coming. With more and more startups enter the scene in every industry, enterprises are finding themselves in a situation where they need to simultaneously stay at the top of their game while also expanding and evolving in order to remain competitive. The result is that enterprises today must have an ecosystem that encourages agility and flexibility, otherwise they may risk falling out of relevance in the eyes of their customers.
While being agile is easy to say, it is often harder to implement; especially when enterprises have long established ecosystems that are set in place and rely on legacy systems that offer little room. So does that mean enterprises must resign to their ill fate and hope for better days? Not at all! There are many things enterprises can do to encourage flexibility within their ecosystem and promote it to their clients.
Transition to Adaptable Systems
One of the things that prevent enterprises from shifting quickly and adjusting to trends and consumer demands is the presence of legacy systems that cannot be modified with ease.
When an enterprise uses systems as part of their operations process that cannot ‘keep up with the times’ so to speak, they are effectively limiting their ability to rapidly adjust to change, leaving them at a disadvantage. In order to ensure that an enterprise is able to respond to market changes or new technologies quickly and efficiently, it’s imperative that companies implement agile systems in their ecosystem in the first place. Changing all of the systems in one shot is unrealistic, however transitioning slowly to a more dynamic system can be done if the CIOs and CTOs start small and pilot new solutions in certain aspects of the operations before implementing company-wide changes.
Think Like a Startup
We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again… there is a reason startups are considered the MacGyver’s of the high-tech world – they stay true to their reputation and do what needs to be done to meet the needs of their clients or consumers, and that means responding immediately to change. 
Enterprises looking to embrace innovation and enhance the speed at which new technology is integrated into their ecosystems and their solutions can simply begin adopting the best aspects of the startup mentality (with the added benefit of an established brand with a strong financial backing). One of the ways to do that is by encouraging innovation from within. When c-level decision makers recognize certain aspects of their ecosystem restrict their ability to respond to change, the foot soldiers of the company have likely known about the issues for a long time. By encouraging employees to speak up about issues within the company and taking their suggestions seriously, companies will not only enhance the speed at which problems become known, but they may also find the solution coming from within the enterprise itself.
Another important lesson enterprises can learn from startups is the commitment to transparency across the board – especially when a new innovation is integrated into the enterprise’s ecosystem. The stereotypical enterprise has a strict hierarchy where employees are one piece of the complex pie and often do not know what the other people in the company are doing. When integrating a new technology, it is important to educate the employees and encourage feedback. In doing so, not only will the company employees feel more connected to the solution and understand the reason for the change, but they will be able to provide honest feedback in a timely manner that may impact that scaling of the solution.
Source Solutions from the Outside (with PoCs)
While transitioning systems and adjusting the company to be more like a startup are long term things enterprises can adopt, there is a quick solution to integrate new technology that can be tested and scaled, and that’s running a PoC.
Running a PoC with a startup is a great way to test multiple solutions and find the one that works best for your enterprise. The benefit of running a PoC is that it gives enterprise the chance to test solutions not just in theory, but on their own ecosystem and see the true behavior of the solution and determine its viability and scalability. While in the past this may have been daunting for enterprises who didn’t want to compromise their ecosystem’s security or deal with the hassle of searching for startups whose solutions might meet their needs, they can now run PoCs on prooV, test as many solutions as they want simultaneously and only move forward with the one that fits their exact needs best.
No matter what approach your enterprise takes, it’s important to build a solution that makes your enterprise agile enough to adapt to new technologies. Without the ability to quickly integrate and scale new technologies, both internally and within client solutions, enterprises risk becoming dinosaurs and dying out.
