One of the biggest lessons learned by businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic is the need to be agile, to face unthinkable challenges and adapt to rapidly changing market conditions. While the adverse effects of the global crisis are beginning to wane, this lesson is here to stay.

Eighty-seven percent of business leaders believe that the events of 2020 increased the demand for agility, and 83% admit that agility is also critical to their activities in 2021, according to a new BizOps industry research survey on the state of digital business.

“Disruption is no longer an exception; it’s kind of become the norm or the rule,” said Pierre Viljoen (pictured, left), chief technology officer and head of enterprise technology and governance at HCL Technologies Ltd. Enterprise Studio. “And as executives in companies have learned over the last year … what really is needed is for us to understand, going forward, how we’re actually going to remodel our business by harnessing the resources that we have in a much more agile way.”

Viljoen; Serge Lucio (pictured, center), general manager of the Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom Inc.; and Dave West (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Scrum.org, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Chaos to Clarity: BizOps for Digital Transformation event. They discussed how enterprises should embrace agility across their activities, the need for technology to be linked to business outcomes, and how a BizOps strategy can benefit and be valuable for companies. (* Disclosure below.)

Preparing for the unknown normal

It is undeniable that the global pandemic has brought a lot of uncertainty to businesses and that this will not go away anytime soon, despite the vaccines and the economic improvement that is slowly building momentum.

“When I think of sort of uncertainty and chaos, I think that COVID really started it rolling down a hill. But, unfortunately, it’s literally like rolling down a hill … it’s getting faster and faster and harder and harder,” West said. “We’re talking about the new normal, [but] what is the new normal? We just don’t know.”

When organizations were taken aback by the impact of the pandemic on their businesses, they had to act quickly, sending employees to work from home and improving remote operations, for example, to try to survive. While that response was very quick, it was not very strategic, according to West.

“The next few years we’re going to see, hopefully, some of that realizing into strategy and actually starting to fundamentally change how the business is looking at the world,” he said.

In this still uncertain scenario, a big challenge for companies is to plan the short and long term from the investment point of view. Although many organizations are basically focused on just surviving for the next 12 months, according to Lucio, they also need to change their operating model to innovate and gain competitiveness.

“That tension is very real within many of the organizations we serve,” Lucio said.

Linking technology and business is the key

In addition to the challenge of planning investments, enterprises struggle with their tech choices. While they intensely recognize the need to be agile, 50% still have difficulties with key tech initiatives, according to the BizOps Coalition survey.

More importantly, while 95% of survey respondents agree that successful digital transformation is about business outcomes, 62% state that their company has adopted technology “for technology’s sake” rather than to meet business objectives.

For embracing agility across the business, the most important step is to take a couple of solid principles, start to execute them, learn during the process, and improve as you go along, according to Viljoen.

The strategy should also seek to link technology and business in a BizOps model, according to West. The idea is to make the technology serve the enterprise’s objectives and, ultimately, to leverage a business’s bottom line.

“I hope it means that we’re going to see teams better aligned to business outcomes,” West said. “I hope it means that planning is going to be more directional rather than task level. I hope it means that we’re going to start measuring the success in terms of business outcomes, not in terms of the work that we do.”

In fact, 98% of enterprise leaders believe that BizOps benefits are valuable to their company. But adopting the model includes thinking about which part of the teams need to be organized and integrated to deliver specific business results in addition to starting to shift from the traditional contract-based model to a model based more on trust, according to Lucio.

It also involves a cultural change.

“That means that we have to take a step back, which is a very frustrating thing at the moment, and actually look at: What is our business all about? What is the mission of it? Who are the customers?” West said. “Take a moment to find what those are, and then, as soon as we have that, we don’t have to do it completely. We can do it incrementally.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Chaos to Clarity: BizOps for Digital Transformation event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Chaos to Clarity: BizOps for Digital Transformation event. Neither the BizOps Coalition, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE