Is Stability in enterprise systems overrated at the cost of Agility ?
People responsible for stability in an organisation may use concepts such as consistency, predictability and maintaining the status quo. A stable organization is structured in its procedures and processes, knows what direction it is headed and adheres to a prescribed vision, mission and strategic plan. In such an organisation, all enterprise systems are inherently designed to be stable and perform in a predictable way.
Such a commitment to Stability can also have adverse effects on the organisation, namely the resistance to change. With too much focus on stability, their systems and processes gradually become rigid and inflexible to change. The more stable you are, the harder it is to turn/pitch quickly in a dynamic situation.
why should a business be Agile? The dominant pressures pushing business towards agility are:
- Fast paced changing business dynamics,
- disruptive competitors,
- need for delivering urgent continuous innovation
A relevant example is that the work environment changed drastically in the pandemic situation of COVID-19. Agile Businesses converted this into an opportunity and achieved the distinctive advantage over their competitors who were slow to respond because of their traditional Rigid systems.
Agility, by definition, is the ability to change states quickly. Agility increases maneuverability. Agility of a business can also be seen as a measure of Adaptability of business in order to counter the effect of threats.
To achieve agility, Business must align its Strategy, Resources and Systems to be adaptable to change. Low code and No Code platforms are tools provide a great degree of flexibility in building and managing change friendly systems, they can be leveraged to quickly adapt and iterate towards desired business change goals.
Today, Agility in business is vital factor in order to stay relevant and competitive. A business needs to choose its systems considering the Trade-off between choosing rigid, stable systems Vs flexible agile systems which are nimble enough to quickly adapt to challenges.