Why adaptability is key to continued businesses success in the software services industry?
A general observation is that most large organisations who have big infrastructures and a huge client base have a lot of inertia. They are mostly stuck with the mentality that if it works and profits why change it?
With the advent of new technologies that are now financially accessible for most start-ups and new ventures, the game has changed.
Emergent companies have become increasingly disruptive and giving the large and traditional organisations a hard time.
Over the years more free-to-use frameworks and software have been developed. Start ups can now build and scale software at speed. With more people now having access to electronic gadgets, the main differentiator has become the ease of use and great user experience. Most customers, both young and old prefer software that is easy to use, with clarity and less clicks to get to what they need to work with. Thus, it has increasingly become easier to lose some of the most loyal customers to competitors ever than before.
The competition in the IT industry is increasing on a daily basis. It has become evident that only companies that will adapt to change faster are more likely to survive.
Software companies now need to optimise the software development beyond the development team to the operations to deliver value at speed.
New tools and processes have been introduced to optimise the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Tasks that are repetitive are now being automated. More time and human resources are freed up for innovation as a result of automation. Through automated testing, human error can be eliminated. It is only fair to note that people are always going to make mistakes, they are humans after all, why try to fix them then? Instead of trying to fix people to not make errors, fix the machines (configurations, scripts etc). Ask how the system failed and improve it so that the error doesn’t happen again. Computers are very good at repeating what they did right or wrong the same way they did it before. Organisations that have adopted automation are deploying code at least ten times more faster than the ones that are still doing working manually. Also organisations that have adapted automation can now identify faults easily since processes are easily repeatable.
As highlighted earlier, a lot of open source software has been developed which can be leveraged by small to medium companies to become competitive. It is of utmost importance that tech companies keep up to speed with the latest tech trends, to deliver value to their customers faster. It is increasingly becoming necessary to have a resource dedicated to researching new tech trends, be it in tools or processes. This is to help companies to remain relevant and competitive in the ever evolving IT industry.
In conclusion, moving too slow in adapting change in favor of old ways of working and system stability can lead to unintended consequences such as losing the competitive edge and customers, and possibly liquidation . Change is one of the constants in today’s IT world, and agility and adaptability are necessities to remain relevant and to have an edge over your competitors.
