Agile Organization

Investment in FinTech ventures is growing, and FinTech startups are quickly developing disruptive, a new technology that is forcing traditional banks to either adapt or lose market share.

These technological advances cover every area of finance, from lending to investment advice, to foreign exchange and payments. Examples include:

• Straight-Through Processing that can automate repetitive back-office tasks, eliminate paperwork, boost productivity, and improve regulatory compliance
• Automated “Robo-Advisors” that leverage computer algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage investment portfolios at a fraction of the cost of a human advisor
• Online-only banks that significantly reduce operating costs and boost profitability by eliminating call centers and bank branches
• Personalized banking apps that help users identify more ways to save money
• Blockchain technologies that can provide everything from payment processing, to share trading, to verification of land ownership

Banks and financial organizations of all kinds must adopt Agile methods in order to streamline back-office functions, enhance security and compliance, and quickly adopt new technology to develop better products that can compete with those of their smaller, more nimble rivals.

With Amazon forming a healthcare company, and technology giant Apple launching its Health Records platform, health insurance organizations, hospitals, and medical providers are all looking to adopt new technology in order to deliver a more streamlined experience to customers and patients, and keep up with competitors.

Healthcare organization leaders are working hard to create, update, and continuously improve their processes to align with their mission.

Top priorities include providing appropriate levels of patient care and patient care quality, as well as learning about patient and health plan member populations, and optimizing costs for healthcare delivery.

Since these priorities are so focused on process efficiencies and patient health management outcomes, healthcare leaders are learning from and implementing Lean methodologies, which focus on understanding and improving customer value for both patients and providers.

Agile methods allow healthcare organizations to adopt new technology, quickly develop new applications, and find more ways to make their organizations connected and digitally-enabled in order to create more value and provide the best patient experience possible.

For eCommerce companies competing with giant online retailers such as Amazon and Wal-Mart, it’s no longer sufficient to just have a functioning website that can take orders and process payments.

In order to overcome the many challenges eCommerce organizations face today, they must be able to:

• Scale production, order fulfillment, and service if customer demand spikes
• Quickly react to changing customers needs, trends, and pricing updates
• Use technology to integrate with suppliers and efficiently manage the supply chain
• Mitigate security risks and technology failures that cause downtime and lost revenue
• Adapt to new technology currently disrupting retail, such as Augmented Reality (AR), location, and voice technologies

By adopting Agile methods, eCommerce organizations can successfully overcome these challenges, gain the ability to generate innovative ideas and execute them before competitors and provide a fast, secure, exciting customer experience in order to stand out and avoid commoditization.

The current approach to procurement relies heavily on requirements and specifications that are written up-front. While this approach may work for simple problems that are easy to define, more complex problems with many unknown, changing variables require a more agile approach.

Instead of strictly adhering to requirements that have been written up-front, an agile approach focuses more on outcomes, and allows for adjustments when new needs and problems are discovered.

The result is better products and services that emerge through an iterative, flexible, collaborative effort.