A company’s agility depends on the IT components it implements

With the Covid-19 crisis, teleworking has broken all pre-existing taboos about productivity, and has even been embraced by heavy industries producing complex products. Toyota, for example, completed several design and test stages remotely before the launch of its new Sienna minivan, partly designed from the homes of team members.

40% of employees who teleworked during Covid-19 now work permanently in this way. 30% of frontline workers and teleworkers reported that Covid-19 increased their burnout.

Effective collaboration tools can fix this while keeping your business agile.

  • DOCUMENT STORAGE

The cloud is the cornerstone upon which to build centralised storage of data and documents. Regular monitoring of updates allows employees to closely follow what is happening. Contract lifecycle management, for example, is a critical and complex area, where documents are maintained by several departments and functions.

  • APPLICATION-BASED COLLABORATIONS

The next step is to determine which applications are effective. Companies must empower their employees to choose apps and widgets. Application suites now allow plug-and-play set-up with almost no programming. The Oil & Gas division at General Electric had about 900 applications in 2016. Most of them were only used by a hundred users, yet they were considered vital. Fifty employees were trained in creating and deploying applications on the cloud. Migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reduced the total cost by 50%.

  • THE ARCHITECTURE OF MICRO-SERVICES WITH APIs

Applications must be integrated with each other to reflect end-to-end business processes. An architecture based on microservices uses weakly coupled applications which inter-communicate using APIs. In 2015, the financial company Capital One decided to host all of its applications on AWS. Following migration to the cloud, the company uses microservices and agile methodologies to bring new products and features to market in just a few weeks.

In conclusion, companies must not simply move onto the cloud, but fully seize the opportunities it offers.

Finally, with globalisation and new working methods, more and more projects are being carried out by offshore teams.

In this context, there is a great urgency to adapt to these working methods in order to keep teams agile.

Download our e-book and discover the two other essential components for ensuring good organisation of your company and maintaining agility among your teams.  

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