Building a resilient organization

Success today doesn’t guarantee success tomorrow. To remain successful, no matter what the future brings, organizations have always needed to demonstrate resilience. Today, that resilience…

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OpenText

May 29, 20205 minutes read

Success today doesn’t guarantee success tomorrow. To remain successful, no matter what the future brings, organizations have always needed to demonstrate resilience. Today, that resilience must be built on digital technologies.

Resilient companies adapt to change in systemic ways, ensuring they are prepared and able to avoid being disrupted when the next big change inevitably hits. They have the tools and processes needed to be disruptors instead, innovating and succeeding where their competitors cannot.

Whether you are hit by a critical supply chain failure, an economic downturn or a global pandemic, resilience means more than simply being able to take a punch and remain standing. Resilience is your organization’s ability to withstand a threat and come out on the other side even stronger than before.

So how does digital technology support resilience?

Work from everywhere

Most of us recognize that mobile technologies, the cloud, Wi-Fi and data networks have enabled us to work outside of a traditional office environment. But the COVID-19 outbreak has hammered that message home in ways that are impossible to ignore.

Overnight, OpenText™ moved over 97% of our 15,000 global employees to remote working in response to the COVID-19 crisis. What we discovered was that productivity did not drop off, it increased. Collaboration did not grind to a halt, if anything teams were able to collaborate more. And employee motivation – especially during this difficult time – remained high, even as people multi-tasked between employee, teacher, caregiver and parent!

This raises questions about old ways of working. Does it really make sense to expect employees to commute to work in a centralized location when they can accomplish just as much from their home office? Do businesses really need to maintain so much expensive office real estate when their workforces can be equally effective working from home?

I think this experience will lead many companies to embrace a hybrid model, digitally transforming to better enable a mix of office and remote working. In doing so, they will also be building resilience against other, different challenges in the future.

Collaborate with everyone

Cloud-based platforms are vital for digital transformation. They enable people to collaborate with their colleagues remotely, no matter what devices or operating systems they are using. And they make this possible without companies having to manage IT on premises. This reinforces resilience.

Organizations need seamless access to information and people, regardless of location. That’s the only way, for example, a health technology company like Philips can quickly bring together experts from around the world to help diagnose and treat people with cancer.

“The way healthcare is delivered now, it’s not just a single location or even a single workstation,” said Shawn Gibbons, head of the Platform Solutions Group for Philips Radiation Oncology. “It is spread across multiple facilities and multiple caregivers alike. Physicians, nurses and other treatment staff need access to the patient data. And, when they do look at data, they’re not looking at it from only one particular application, but across multiple applications.”

Soon, it’s easy to imagine even greater opportunities for collaboration that can be achieved with AI and automation. Whether it’s automating routine tasks or analyzing vast amounts of data to enable better decision-making, AI and automation can fundamentally change the way we work and collaborate. Knowing which members of a team will be joining a videoconference, for instance, AI could automatically create an agenda for the meeting, and then convert the meeting recording into a searchable text document for later reference. People could then change or add information, but the tedious job of generating documents in the first place can be handled by automation.

Disrupt everything

Resilience isn’t just about responding to crises; it’s about staying on your feet while the ground shifts under you. It’s about moving forward as the landscape transforms and deploying digital technologies to help organizations build resilience at an entirely new scale. Look at Ant Financial, a $150 billion company built on a digital core. Through its widespread use of AI—from mobile payments to qualifying borrowers—the company outperforms traditional big banks, serving 10 times as many customers with a fraction of the workforce.

Automation and AI enable businesses to dramatically expand their scope, as well as their ability to learn and change. We’re seeing adoption taking place across industries, and the organizations that embrace these technologies will become more efficient and resilient as a result. One of our customers, E & J Gallo Winery, will be using our Magellan AI platform to gain new insights into customer behavior while simplifying data integration, aggregation and analysis across multiple sources.

By putting technology to work on tasks where they’re most efficient, companies can free up people to focus their energy and creativity where it matters most. And this promotes greater innovation, competitiveness and long-term resilience. In today’s fast-changing and uncertain business climate, that is essential.

Building the resilient organization

Resilient organizations must be able to adapt quickly to accelerating change. Across organizations, this requires technologies and processes that scale quickly and reliably, empower and secure a remote workforce, and provide supply chain flexibility.

Find out how OpenText can help your organization become resilient with our on-demand content from OpenText Enterprise World Digital.

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OpenText

OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight through market-leading information management solutions, powered by OpenText Cloud Editions.

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