How your business can use smart approaches to drive innovation and gain competitive advantage: free report

PA’s ‘Smart organisations’ survey of global business leaders found 48% of major companies are now exploiting smart technology to drive innovative and secure competitive advantage.

Our ‘Smart organisations’ survey report will tell you:

• how your business can capitalise on new technologies to innovate with less risk

• what barriers you are likely to face when you implement smart initiatives

• how you can overcome the barriers to create a business environment where smart approaches can flourish.

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Read more about our ‘Smart organisations’ global survey of business leaders.

Smart organisations: extracting new value from data assets

Business intelligence derived from smart technologies can give organisations a clearer picture of their performance. It can help them to understand customer needs, discover new markets, identify more efficient ways of working and cut costs. Organisations that use smart data effectively understand where and how they should innovate to gain competitive advantage.

For these organisations, one of the advantages of this approach is that it offers a relatively low-risk, low-cost route to innovation. The data assets on which smart approaches depend already exist and, to a certain extent, becoming smart is simply a question of linking data, systems and people to reveal new insight and release value.

Becoming a smart organisation: recognising the challenges

While approaches that exploit the business intelligence generated by smart technologies offer a relatively low-risk, low-cost route to innovation, becoming a smart organisation is not without difficulty.

• An end-to-end approach is required: To capture, analyse and act on business intelligence, organisations need to share information effectively across departments. However our survey shows that, in a third of cases, business units won’t work together. 

• Strong business support is necessary: Strong business support is necessary to drive through smart initiatives.  However, 34% of those we surveyed said they had difficulty convincing key internal stakeholders of the benefits of smart approaches.

• Employees must be supported: Smart initiatives bring fundamental changes to the way employees work, so strong support for employees goes hand-in-hand with successful implementation. However, around half of the business leaders we surveyed said that they had failed to support staff adequately during the transition to new ways of working.

Creating the right environment for the smart organisation to flourish

What conditions must be in place if the smart organisation is to flourish?

• Leaders with vision: Crucial to bringing the smart organisation to life are leaders who are prepared to think innovatively and are committed to ensuring business information is used actively at all levels. Business leaders aiming to transform their organisations need to be able to take their people – both customers and employees – with them on the journey to innovation. 

• An agile approach: To seize the opportunities for innovation that smart approaches offer, organisations must be flexible enough to make change happen quickly. Smart organisations making a successful transition to agile approaches maintain core project management practices until they have established a track record of implementing smart initiatives successfully.

• Clear processes and protocols: At a process level, business leaders must recognise the challenges presented by the flow of large amounts information from varied sources through business systems. Clear protocols for its management and analysis are required.
  

PA has worked with organisations across many sectors to help them realise the benefits of smart approaches. For example, we helped outdoor advertising firm JCDecaux increase customer satisfaction by developing a real-time mobile solution to allow bill posters to capture proof of posting in situ. We also created a ground-breaking portal that transformed the way the UK Met Office captures and shares weather data, establishing the organisation as the number one weather data aggregator in the world.

To find out how PA can help you exploit smart approaches to achieve competitive advantage, please contact us now.