Adaptive Enterprise

Adaptive Systems are found around us, in biology as well as in many successful social structures. We perhaps owe our day-to-day function and our mental exploits to our adaptive nature and sub-systems. Each individual, family or social unit is indeed an adaptive enterprise. Businesses operate in a similar manner in the same unpredictable environment.

Since unpredictability and change are unavoidable consequences of doing business in an unpredictable, discontinuous business environment, the strategy that makes sense is to combat uncertainty on three key fronts - keep an eye on future research, technology and trends; instantaneously sense and respond to customer trends and feedback; and find ways to steer your core competence despite and in-concert with the changing landscape, embracing new opportunities along the way.

The first goal can be addressed by instilling a strong commitment to sensing, understanding and embracing upcoming research and trends.

The second goal will be achieved by planning to be adaptive i.e. streamlining your processes, flows and campaigns to handle almost-real-time channels. For example, by deploying an infrastructure that can easily accommodate (in a cost-effective manner) changes to business processes, by running a supply chain that will respond to supply/demand not only in real time and relatively instantaneous but also with some immunity (e.g. by virtue of global redundancy) to geo-political and economical conditions, by responding to customers' pulse in-tandem (actual feedback as well customer intelligence/personalization - big data, social media, dedicated clouds, loyalty factors), and judiciously pivoting on key value propositions e.g. in response to rolling out minimum viable products.

The third goal is accomplished by recognizing your core business values, strengths, people and processes, and leveraging as well as adapting these in the face of change, seeking a positive net gain as the response to disruption.

An adaptive enterprise supports an infrastructure that is able to sense change and respond quickly to market needs. An adaptive enterprise helps CIO's link business with IT. This enables them to make decisions quickly to stay ahead of their competitors. This increases the company's profitability.