Change is the Hardest Thing – Can You Keep UP

Earlier this year I authored a blog on change.  It attracted a lot of attention and feedback from friends and colleagues.  The MIT Sloan Management Review has been featuring a section on the New Intelligent Enterprise.  Intended to elevate the importance of business intelligence, the articles have highlighted the fact that the number of changes facing businesses today is accelerating and their impact on success is growing.

Most companies are ill-equipped to stay abreast of the changes facing them.  Continual reorganizations, adding and subtracting lines of business, rolling out new products, shifting resources to different locations, acquiring another company…. these are everyday occurances in our global marketplace and will only increase in number, pace and complexity.  The authors from Sloan Management Review – all academics focused on using technology to improve access to data that will enable companies to get smarter about the impact of these changes on business success – point out most companies continue to rely on old methods, technologies and processes for coping with these changes.

if you want to adapt your business to the new demands put on your business by all these changes in the business model, you need to have flexible tools and processes that enable people in your company to connect naturally in the way they work.  Businesses must become organic in their approach to organization and analytics so that their plans and forecasts can adjust to the new business environment they face each day. That is tough when your technology forces you into structured data models, hard coded queries, static reports and silos of single purpose applications and data bases.

These boundaries are the ingredients of virtually all of today’s business applications and environments.  As a result, adapting to change becomes a matter of redesigning, rebuilding, reformatting, redoing.  In business, “Re” means latency, cost, falling behind, and waste.  “Re” is not good except if you are recycling.

We think that technology has advanced to enable companies to take the “Re” out of play so they can now embrace change. With an in memory calculation engine and organic data structure, the revolutionary Anaplan analytics, forecasting and planning platform allows you to build models which enable your applications and business flows to automatically adapt to the changes you introduce into the business.  Want to do a reorg of Sales, done in minutes and your business plans and forecasts now reflect the reorg and allow you to go back and compare your previous business results within the framework of the new organization.  Same for your acquisitions and adding new lines of business.

Grow, expand, reorganize. Change doesn’t have to be the hardest thing anymore. Adapt with Anaplan and not only will you keep up. You will show the way.