The professional services sector is continually evolving, with technology undeniably changing the way businesses operate. To stay competitive and relevant, organisations need to adapt quickly to change. To respond rapidly, they need to have the right digital tools.
As we look to a post-pandemic world, businesses need to ensure their digital strategy is agile to leverage the potential of emerging technologies. The importance of digital agility in the professional services sector cannot be understated.
What is digital agility?
Simply put, digital agility refers to how businesses can respond and adapt to technology changes. To be agile is to ‘move easily and quickly’ and digital agility is positively leveraging technology, rapidly and efficiently.
Digital agility comprises more than one factor, including technology, leadership, culture, analysis, and so on. It forms the basis for strategically planning your business’s digital transformation.
Why is digital agility important?
Before the pandemic, the main drivers of digital transformation were customer demand, business priorities, and market changes. The global pandemic forced many businesses to shift rapidly towards adopting technology, achieving several years of digital transformation in months. The objective was to find a way to stay operational with as few financial demands as possible. Moving forward into the post-pandemic world, the professional services sector will need to continue to adapt to thrive, adopting technology that further speeds up internal processes and customer-facing operations.
How to find the right digital tools
Digital agility empowers organisations to scale their business practices rapidly, to test and implement new technology tools that enable efficiency and higher return on investments. Having the ability to adjust operations according to market demands is essential for many professional services to achieve business objectives. It can be invaluable to have the support of IT professionals to work towards implementing the right sort of digital tools for your business and removing inefficient systems and clunky tools that slow down business growth.
Agile digital solutions include:
Cloud computing
As cloud computing has grown in popularity, it has allowed professional service providers to gain access to solutions and specialist skills that were previously unavailable. Smaller firms are now able to compete with their larger industry competitors. Cloud computing offers many benefits including only paying for what you use, reducing the need for expensive IT infrastructure, and boosting customer experience and satisfaction.
Mobile technology
Today’s business world is mobile, especially since the advent of the hybrid business model, combining both remote work and on-site environments. Collaboration and communication tools such as Microsoft 365 enables workers to work on the go and collaborate regardless of where they are.
Data collection and analysis
Business intelligence is essential for making smart decisions and driving growth. To achieve business objectives, professional services firms need to leverage large amounts of data to gain deeper insights into customers and markets. Tools that look at customer sentiment, social media monitoring, and website traffic tracking can help with the acquisition of market and customer data.
Automation
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are no longer the realm of science fiction, being used more frequently in business to automate mundane tasks that use up human resources that could be better used on high-value tasks, such as client service or complex project management. Automation tools allow streamlining of existing processes, giving businesses access to new revenue streams that can increase profit margins.
How to overcome digital agility challenges
The most common obstacle to achieving digital agility tends to revolve around cost, but professional services have begun to overcome this challenge by outsourcing their IT infrastructure to cloud providers and IT managed service providers. This allows firms to avoid having to invest in and maintain expensive IT hardware and software, allowing more focus on bringing in talent and developing strategies to compete in a crowded market. Outsourcing also enables small to medium-sized businesses to access new and emerging technology that was previously out of their reach.
In today’s rapidly evolving digital world, companies need to be ready for anything in order to thrive and stay competitive. Being digitally agile puts your business in front of the others as you keep up with market forces and seamlessly integrate new solutions. Stay ahead of the competition with expert IT support from Itopia and benefit from tailored digital solutions.
