Business Agility

I've always liked to talk about agility or speed. I think because is one of the major factors a company can use to gain more ground against competitors and become more efficient.

Competition is out there for every company (if your company or idea doesn't have competition, be careful, something maybe really wrong) and is looking to crunch you in every way as possible. That's why is important to businesses  have enough speed for implementing the necessary changes to face actions from the competition. Companies that fail doing this, are condemned to operate in a traditional way for a long time and remain passive against changing external factors.

But, aside organizations need speed to face competition, I think it is more important to have speed to implement changes in the inside of the organization. Changes in processes for example can take a long time for human resources to learn and adapt. For example, if an organization makes changes in the process for developing new products, people that use this process have to be retrain and wait for them to become familiar to the new process (it's easier to learn than to relearn). Process automation diminishes this kind of barriers inside businesses because human resources don't have to know about the process or the new version of a process and they can focus on doing their tasks allowing more time for creativity and other soft factors in the organization.

These types of issues tend to increment while small businesses becomes bigger. More processes are needed to handle operations and the speed, the small company once had, is gone. That's why I think small and medium business are the ones with more benefits in doing business process automation.

Speed is clearly a competitive advantage in any business. Not only for facing the competition, but also to implementing changes inside of our organizations and, at the end of chain, generating more value to our customers, the whole purpose of our existence (and yours too).