Business Agility (eBook)

Mobile Business = Business Process + Electronic Business + Wireless Communications

Mobile business, or M-Business, is already changing our lives. It is often thought of as the business opportunity that has been brought about by the convergence of electronic business with wireless technologies. We can now conduct business anytime and anyplace in order to meet the informational and transactional demands of end users, remove former process and technology bottlenecks, and hence increase customer satisfaction, revenues and productivity, and reduce costs.

But beyond this simple description, we are entering an entirely new erathe era of business agility, which is the next evolution of business itself. This is a superset, not a mere extension, of electronic business. It is here that mobile business will have its most profound effect. The changes will be widespread. They will affect our companies, our markets, our economy, our lifestyles, our politics, and our global perspectives and interactions.

This book is designed to serve as a handbook for this next business evolution. The era of Business Agility presents us with a new era of enterprise value and productivity after the crash and disappointment of the prior wave of E-Business initiatives. Over the past several years, businesses have made great strides in improving customer service, productivity, and manufacturing processes. Businesses have optimized their relatively unchanging processes and value propositions and have gained considerable efficiencies. Information technology has played a large role in facilitating these increases in productivity. But the next competitive frontier will be how quickly these businesses can sense and respond to change. The next step is to be able to create new processes and new value propositions in a rapidly changing business environment and be able to institute these changes rapidly. These changes must also have a higher degree of flexibility engineered-in once implemented. In an era when entire industries are converging, enterprise agility, and the ability to create dynamic value propositions, will separate the winners from the losers in the battle for mindshare and marketshare.

The ability to leverage M-Business to pull information rapidly and accurately from the 'edge' of the corporation in the areas of sales, marketing, and customer service will be critical for the agile enterprise. Likewise, the ability to leverage M-Business to push management decisions back out to the field, where those decisions can be acted upon, will be critical as well. M-Business represents an opportunity to increase business agility across the entire breadth of the corporationfrom its core to its extremitiesconnecting management with employees, customers, suppliers, and business partners.

Without this business agility, even companies that have highly optimized processes and excellent customer service today will find themselves struggling to compete over the next several years owing to information and transaction chokepoints that delay decision making and employee action. Not only will they experience a critical time delay in their enterprise operations and customer and supplier interactions, they will also experience information gaps where they are less informed of critical business events and metrics in their surrounding environment. They will be less aware of the business context in which they operate and will lack a competitive edge.