Creating Business Agility

Preface

Problem: The key problem is that our business environment is changing—changing at an ever-faster pace. Now the only thing constant is change; with a higher frequency since the Internet as disruptive innovation became a fundamental of the business world. Yet human behavioral changes always happen more slowly than the technological changes that spawn them.

In order to see ahead, it's useful to look back 20 years across five stages of the first generation of revolutionary business practices:

1. E-commerce along the information superhighway
2. E-business in the dot-com era
3. Collaborative commerce by virtual enterprises at the turn of the twenty-first century
4. Social business evolution of Web 2.0 over the past decade
5. Business ecosystems as a twenty-first-century business model of a digital business

A digital business consists of a set of digital stakeholder relationships. They empower employees and engage trading partners to form a virtual enterprise. The digital businesses operate separately along with social business practices and processes. Today, a customer-focused digital business model leverages stakeholder relationships using digital collaboration channels in their virtual enterprise to deliver a great customer experience that will produce a market leader. Yet the only way to sustain their competitive advantage is for digital businesses to sense changes in their business ecosystem, and then adapt their plans based on predictions of how these insights will produce customer ...