ServiceNow is emerging as the most powerful automation tool for solving enterprise problems. It provides digital solutions to automate & optimize the internal and external business processes. A platform that started as a simple ticketing tool is now a global services provider with its tagline “The Smarter Way to Workflow”. ServiceNow’s mission is to “Transform IT to Revolutionize the Enterprise”. It aligns with its customers planning digital transformations from manual and legacy processes. The tool provides consolidated and standardized automated services & workflows. Here are some major contributors of why ServiceNow is the ultimate workflow automation tool there is on the market.
Let’s dive in!
One platform for multiple business problems
Another reason for ServiceNow being a powerful tool is its many product offerings. ServiceNow addresses a wide variety of business problems with its automated solutions. This makes the decision easier for organizations to choose a single tool over many. ServiceNow evolves with each release and all standard out-of-the-box solutions enrich over time.
Simplicity of the automated tool
Although ServiceNow offers extensive features, it’s far from being complex. The simple core of the platform ensures the consistency of all the workflows built on it. The low-code to no-code implementation options are available to configure the tool as needed. It is one of the very few technical tools where the people from business & management can have technical oversight. Just a basic understanding of ServiceNow as a platform goes a long way.
Power of custom automations
Why is it claimed that anything is possible in ServiceNow? It isn’t because the tool offers everything! It means if there is no out-of-the-box solution available for business needs, then create one without moving out of the tool. The power lies in the ability to create digital workflows from scratch, utilizing the ServiceNow platform. The possibilities become limitless with ServiceNow Creator workflows.
Power of integrations
Instead of competing with other systems, ServiceNow compliments other systems. This is possible by ServiceNow’s ability to integrate with any tool in the enterprise. ServiceNow has simple yet powerful integration options available including REST, SOAP, Emails etc. ServiceNow IntegrationHub supports many out-of-the-box spokes to support integration tasks.
Resource for business leaders
While the employees of any organization perform, the business leaders measure. Any tool that offers tons of technical solutions, but zero business value is of no use for leaders. The business leaders ensure that their organization only invests in the right tool. ServiceNow has a huge favour of business leaders because it offers as many business benefits as technical ones. Here are to list few of them:
- The ServiceNow platform is a very flexible tool and environment. It conforms and adapts to the business processes as per the allowed configurations
- The service-oriented processes of ServiceNow ensure business optimization and delivery across the platform
- The ServiceNow Performance Analytics assists strategic decisions by providing real-time reporting, trends, and forecasts
- ServiceNow workflows provide digitization and automation that transforms the operational productivity
- ServiceNow does not only provide workflows to get the job done. It facilitates the efficiency of the job and business. All these contribute to the business efficiency of the organizations
When organizations get a technical tool, they try to find out its business value. ServiceNow makes so much business sense already. that the organizations are trying to find out its technical value and usage. And this is the essence of ServiceNow’s strategy which sets it apart in the market as an automation tool.
3 ways businesses can maintain rock-solid customer service when the unexpected happens
When your business is still in its infancy, it’s relatively easy to deliver dedicated and effective customer support. That’s one of the reasons a lot of people like to do business with promising startups and smaller companies. There remains a widespread fear that larger operations can’t deliver the high level of customer service that today’s consumers expect. And, who can blame them, given how they’re spoiled for choice?
Much like the empires of old collapsed under their own weight as they grew, business growth comes with a parallel set of risks. When your reach is limited to just a handful of customers, you can easily remember all of them and nurture more personal relationships with them. But, as your company grows, customer support agents will soon be overwhelmed with requests. It won’t be long before your customers start looking elsewhere.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. With the right mix of process and technology, you can scale customer support like any other operation. There are three key elements in scaling these operations:
- Automate everything that can be automated
- Provide a guided multi-step process
- Route tasks to the right place
Let’s take a deeper dive into the above:
#1. Automate self-service
For most companies, the vast majority of customer support requests concern issues which have been solved before. As such, there’s no point in your agents spending most of their time repeating themselves over and over. Moreover, the last thing customers want is to wait on hold until an agent becomes available.
Most customers prefer to help themselves if at all possible. Establish automated workflows for things like routine troubleshooting and resolving common problems. Help customers quickly find answers to their questions with AI-powered chatbots and smart search functions. Provide a community forum and knowledgebase where customers can support each other. However, remember that humans still have a critical role to play – customers should always be able to contact an agent if they can’t find a quick answer to their problem any other way.
Automating such a large range of processes might sound daunting, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds. The best practice is to start small in an iterative manner, using all available and suitable platform features to digitise and automate manual processes where possible. As with any area of digital transformation, the goal shouldn’t be to automate everything from the very beginning, but to plan, prioritise, and continuously improve.
#2. Provide a guided process
User experience is now a key driver of purchase decisions, and at no point is it more important than when a customer is trying to get support. Most of us have experienced the endless back and forth of poor customer support, where a general lack of guidance and consistency make it nigh impossible to find the right solution.
A guided process simplifies the customer’s experience and lets them find what they’re looking for faster. You can use data analytics to map their current actions and review that information to find opportunities for improvement. For example, if customers aren’t providing the details needed to resolve a particular problem, it might be necessary to provide additional forms and conditional fields. With a guided multi-step process that only asks for the information needed to solve a problem, customers can enjoy faster resolution times.
#3. Optimise task delegation
Automation is the holy grail of business scalability, but some organisations end up relying on it too much. Many of us have experienced the frustration of dealing with a chatbot or trawling through an online knowledgebase only to leave without answers.
Some problems require a human touch, and it’s essential that you assign the right people to the job. Fortunately, you can also automate task delegation and, in doing so, prevent agents from having to handle issues they’re not best equipped to deal with. With dynamic scheduling, you can automate the task assignment process based on factors like skill, priority, availability, and where relevant, travel time.
Best practices for managing cloud spend without increasing operational risk
A Gartner study revealed that 80% of organisations go over budget with their cloud migration projects. Moreover, most cloud costs simply end up going to waste on resources that will never be used. For many business leaders, figures like these come as quite a surprise, especially since we’re so used to hearing about how the cloud is supposed to save money.
But, as often turns out to be the case, the problem is a human one, rather than a technological one. No cloud provider is going to stop you from ordering any amount of resources you want, whether you need them or not. To truly benefit from the unlimited scalability and reduced IT costs of the cloud, you need to implement a cloud cost-control strategy yourself.
Here are five ways to navigate the challenges:
#1. Simplify how work gets done
We might be more connected than ever, but the increasing multitude of devices, platforms and software has also made technology infrastructures dizzyingly complex. And doing away with the old to bring in the new isn’t going to solve the problem either. Without a proper strategy, you’ll likely end up worse off than when you started. More than ever, organisations must strive to unify their technology and operational infrastructures in a seamless environment. Workflows need to be transferrable without running into compatibility issues. A big part of that depends on cutting out the software bloat and having full visibility into your IT assets.
#2. Reduce technology waste
Electronic waste is fast becoming one of the major environmental challenges of our time. The throwaway society, accentuated by rapid technological obsolescence, places organisations in an awkward position when it comes to acquiring new assets and retiring old ones. When using the cloud, these factors are often out of sight and out of mind, even though they still have a direct impact on how much you spend. For example, you shouldn’t be paying for data storage and compute power you don’t need, but you should still be able to upgrade easily in periods of increased demand.
#3. Enhance security operations
While modern data centres operated by companies lik e Amazon or Google are some of the most secure facilities in the world, almost all data breaches occur at the hands of end users. Investing yet more money into cybersecurity might not sound like a good way to reduce cloud spend, but the costs of a data breach are many times worse. Every cloud asset needs to be protected with multifactor authentication and round-the-clock monitoring. But, thanks to AI and automation, there are also ways to reduce information security costs and proactively respond to potential threats faster.
#4. Consolidate business resources
Another important step in optimising cloud spend is to identify and consolidate idle resources. For example, if a computing instance only ever has a CPU utilisation level of 5%, you’re likely paying far more than you need. After all, most cloud providers charge per resource, and not for how much you actually utilise those resources. Instead, seek out and consolidate any idle computing instances into fewer ones. At the same time, be sure you can accommodate spikes in traffic by implementing autoscaling, on-demand capabilities, and load-balancing across your infrastructure.
#5. Build a robust migration plan
We’ll end on the important but often underrepresented note that not all applications are a good fit for the cloud. While the vast majority of computing workloads can indeed be virtualized and shifted over to the cloud, it doesn’t mean they’ll always be economical. Examples include any application that’s highly sensitive to latency and those which require specialised hardware. It’s also important to prioritise your cloud migration accordingly, rather than migrating everything over at once. Start small, but think big from the outset and remember, the cloud is as much a journey as it is a destination.
How integrated software asset management helps streamline inter-departmental operations
By now, most enterprises already have IT service management (ITSM) in place, but software asset management (SAM) often isn’t considered a top priority for CIOs. However, while ITSM is geared more towards the efficient delivery of business-critical services, the fast-increasing complexity of today’s enterprise software environments also make clear the need for SAM. It’s just as important to have a robust strategy for controlling software costs and maintaining your software licensing compliance. Ultimately, it’s about buying only the software you need and using all the software you have. This will decrease the burden on management, while boosting your organisation’s resilience and enabling innovation without adding operational risk.
While it’s always great to have out-of-the-box functionality, increasing complexities in today’s enterprise IT environment make it a practical impossibility in many situations. This is a familiar dilemma to any IT manager or administrator, as they seek to implement more efficient ways of deploying, managing, and retiring software-based assets throughout their lifecycles. That’s why your SAM solution must work seamlessly with your other core business routines, such as product cataloguing, software request processes, database management, procurement, and software licensing optimisation. With an automated and integrated solution, you can reduce the overall delivery time for new software and eliminate manual tasks prone to human error.
Human resources
It’s people, not technology, which drives any business. The HR serves as an umbrella for the entire software lifecycle management process – new hires need new software and licenses to start working. Onboarding a new hire typically starts with HR requesting a new machine with specific software preinstalled, which then needs to go through an approval process. The less time this takes, the sooner the new hire can get to work and, ultimately, reach their maximum level of productivity.
The approval process involves checking the software inventory database for any available software licenses. If there isn’t one available, one may either be repurposed from a retired machine or account or, if there aren’t any, there needs to be a way to send a request to procurement for purchasing the necessary license. It shouldn’t be hard to see why this process, done manually, quickly becomes virtually impossible at scale. That’s why your SAM solution must integrate with HR onboarding processes.
Inventory management
Paid software is typically licensed according to two models: per-core licensing in the case of desktop-side software, or per-user licensing for cloud-based software (as well as an increasing number of locally installed software products). SAM starts with building a complete inventory of your software environment and every license that comes with it. Deploying new installations or opening new user accounts, depending on the license model, consumes a license, except in the case of unlimited licenses.
To optimise software licensing across the enterprise, your SAM solution needs to work with your hardware environment and employee headcount. For example, if a computer is retired, any software licenses installed on that hardware can be placed back in your inventory for use on a new device. Similarly, if an employee leaves the organisation, any account-based apps they use should be made available to a new hire. In other words, inventory management is integral to the decommissioning process.
Software procurement
In today’s enterprises, the ability to innovate and adapt to change without unnecessary hurdles is critical for succeeding in a fast-paced and highly competitive market. That’s why companies need an efficient and established process for requesting new software deployments, not only for new hires, but also for the enterprise as a whole. At the same time, you can hardly afford the risky situation of having thousands of employees being able to download, purchase, or install any software they want without restrictions.
SAM can only be effective if it’s deeply integrated with the procurement and fulfillment process. For example, employees might want to choose from a list of approved applications to deploy on their machines, without having to make a request in person and then wait for a lengthy manual approval process. In another case, the head of a specific business department might want to implement entirely new software without going through unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles first. In the end, the software approval and procurement process should be as fast and as efficient as possible, albeit without adding risk to the organisation. After all, no one wants to go through a week-long approval process just to install Slack or Skype.
Integration + automation = revenue
As the enterprise becomes evermore defined by its software infrastructure, there are many more situations where integration and automation translate into increased revenue. Software asset management solutions are far more than just ways to maintain inventories of software; they also automate compliance, seamlessly support new business needs, strengthen risk tolerance, and reduce costs. Together, these factors boost revenue and help make businesses more adaptable to the constant pace of change.
Remote work is here to stay, but how can companies deliver a great employee experience?
Recent years have seen a surge in remote work. The gig economy is bigger than ever, and employees are craving greater flexibility and a better work/life balance. In many ways, Covid-19 accelerated that. For some companies, it was a brutal wakeup call as they struggled to get their teams to work effectively from home. Now, they’re facing a fresh wave of challenges as people return to the workplace.
On a brighter note, the new normal isn’t just about learning to live with the ongoing pandemic. It’s also an opportunity to make your operations more scalable and business more adaptable to the constant pace of change. This won’t only help you navigate the current challenges, but also the unknown challenges of tomorrow. And since employees are at the heart of everything you do, their experiences are more important than ever.
#1. Keep your employees informed
The fact remains that most of us aren’t well-prepared for a crisis. The tens of millions of job losses and thousands of business closures are testament to that. One of the major causes of this is the widespread lack of communication. When the unexpected happens, organisations often focus more on external communication to keep their customers, vendors, and partners informed. But while external communication is of course essential, it depends in part on how you communicate with your employees.
Make sure your employees have a clear understanding of the situation. Empower them with a flexible workflow solution that helps them adapt quickly and keep up to date on developments. After all, many employees still don’t feel safe returning to work, especially those with existing health conditions. It’s important that you keep lines of communication open to them too.
#2. Gather feedback frequently
Most employees consider themselves disengaged from their jobs. As such, they’re prone to delivering the bare minimum, and their only real motivation is their paycheque. When working from home, there’s often additional temptation to procrastinate, and distractions abound. But employees themselves aren’t always the ones to blame. Rather, the lack of engagement and the tedium of repetitive routine workflows end up draining their desire to do better.
That’s why you need to gather employee feedback at every opportunity, just as you should with your customers. You need to define what shapes their experiences, launch engaging company-wide surveys, and find opportunities for improvement. It’s imperative that you act upon the results.
#3. Automate repetitive processes
With social distancing and other measures still in place in many countries for the time being, there’s more incentive than ever for companies to embrace automation projects. Automation is especially important to organisations which have suffered major economic damage and thus had to lay off a large number of workers. But automating repetitive routine processes is good in the longer term as well, since it frees up time for your employees to work on more rewarding tasks which require a human touch.
Of all business departments, HR has been one of the hardest hit. But they too can automate many of their routine workflows to become more agile, especially during periods of high staff turnover. For example, they can provide automated multi-step onboarding processes to help new hires get started faster, as well as get existing employees up to speed as they return to the workplace.
What the recent ServiceNow integrations mean for DevOps teams
Software development and IT teams have traditionally functioned under their own sets of rules and processes, resulting in operational siloes. The lack of collaboration between the two has long resulted in slower release cycles and increasing complexity when it comes to testing and releasing new solutions.
By extending its reach to DevOps, the industry-leading digital workflow solution ServiceNow has further solidified the connection between IT and software development. Announced on 18 November 2019, the service is available for financial services organizations based in the UK and the north-eastern region of the US.
Here’s what that means for DevOps teams:
End-to-end project visibility
Configurable pipeline modeling gives all relevant parties complete visibility into their projects for simplified management. Teams can also have more than one app per pipeline. The pipeline is defined as a set of steps which, for DevOps teams, typically begins with a planning phase. An app refers to any item currently been worked on, with the work being carried out using a code repository. When any changes are made, the orchestration tool will pick it up and send it through a series of steps up to and including final release.
User-created integrations
Using ServiceNow for DevOps doesn’t mean having to replace your existing toolchain. With integrations for various planning, coding, and orchestration tools provided, teams can connect their current infrastructure with the digital workflow management platform. In addition to these integrations, users may also create their own using these characteristics: metadata of the tool being integrated, tool interactions, mapping integration to tool capability, and staging areas for the notifications flow. Out of the box, ServiceNow supports the following integrations:
- Planning – Jira and ServiceNow Agile Development 2.0
- Coding – GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and Bitbucket Server 5.10.0
- Orchestration – Jenkins with Freestyle projects and three folder levels.
Developer insights
The developer insights dashboard provides full visibility into projects by providing an interface where DevOps teams can track change results and pipeline value streams. Users can also access a more advanced dashboard for tracking commits, deployments, change acceleration, and system health. The wealth of data collected is presented visually to help teams compare multiple data sets and analyse operational and business insights with ease. There’s also an app pipeline user interface which provides a graphical view of projects in progress.
Change acceleration
To support continuous integration and delivery of new software solutions, teams can empower change acceleration by enabling automatic change request creation. Users can configure their own policies for automating approvals when specific conditions are met. For example, setting a threshold for when the calculated risk and impact of a change are sufficiently low makes it possible to automatically move change requests to the implemented stage, so they don’t need manual review. This allows DevOps teams to release less risky updates faster and optimise their workflows around specific business needs.
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GuideVision – ServiceNow Elite Partner to provide consulting on the ServiceNow and Tanium platforms
Business collaborations are extremely valuable in today’s world. GuideVision sees it this way as well, and is building on a partnership with two IT service providers, ServiceNow and Tanium.
Three companies, one goal: Working more efficiently in the digital age
The ServiceNow cloud platform enables people to work better and more efficiently by replacing unstructured work patterns with intelligent and automated workflows. Manual working methods are converted into modern and digital processes.
As one of ServiceNow’s top 10 Elite partners worldwide, GuideVision helps its customers to implement their enterprise service management with ServiceNow’s workflow digitisation. With more than 200 consultants at 7 locations in Europe, GuideVision can already look back on more than 400 successfully completed projects. GuideVision’s secret of success is not only a combination of strategic expertise, agile methodology, and technical know-how, but also close cooperation with ServiceNow.
GuideVision recently began working closely with Tanium, and Tanium also cooperates with ServiceNow. The Tanium platform solves the security and IT management challenges organizations face by providing lightning-fast ability to capture all assets and execute for example software patching in computer networks – with unparalleled scale. Tanium’s approach gives large corporations and government institutions the ability to quickly capture and manage their entire IT infrastructure. IT teams thus have a holistic and precise overview of all of their IT endpoints in order to uncover security risks and implement a new level of cost-efficiency.
The Tanium approach, now for ServiceNow
Tanium and ServiceNow can be combined into a powerful solution that can be used to manage IT and software assets more efficiently, automate patching and compliance, and create a consistent real-time CMDB. With Tanium, legacy IT assets within the ServiceNow environment can be identified in a matter of seconds and thus better managed in the future. On the other hand, ServiceNow enables existing assets to be upgraded to modern workflows in order to make processes more efficient.
GuideVision consulting
As part of this new collaboration and as a ServiceNow Elite Partner, GuideVision has now started to introduce its clients to the benefits of including Tanium’s products and services into their ServiceNow adoption and implementation strategy.
GuideVision is a dynamic and progressive ESM consulting company that specialises exclusively in ServiceNow consulting, implementation, training, and support. We support medium and large organisations from various countries in regional and international markets.
The GuideVision team is made up of more than 200 ServiceNow experts in 7 branches in Europe. GuideVision has a track record of more than 400 successful ServiceNow projects.
3 ways today’s businesses are unlocking value and navigating constant digital disruption
Around 72% of digital transformation projects fail to achieve their goals. This sobering figure illustrates just how difficult it is to navigate constant digital disruption. While companies across every industry are investing feverishly in digital strategy, often resulting in bursts of innovation, many of these changes fail to stick. All too often do these experiments fail as soon as they run into periods of unexpected demand or sudden changes in customer habits.
Never has it been more important to develop an adaptable digital strategy driven by the right blend of people, process, and technology. Above all, remember that digital transformation isn’t a destination, but rather a journey of continuous improvement and adaptation. It’s not about making lots of costly and radical changes from the outset, but about finding a way to navigate the disruption and avoid making poor investment choices.
Scalability is an overused buzzword for sure. But what does it really mean, and why does it matter? Firstly, it’s not the same as business growth, but in today’s digital-first world, it’s a key enabler of growth. When businesses can scale their operations seamlessly, they can handle more sales while becoming more cost-efficient. In this article, we’ll explore the critical factors that can make that happen.
#1. Bolster your competitive advantage
Perhaps the most common reason for digital transformation initiatives to fail is that they don’t consider the most critical factor of all – the customer. A lot of digital transformations happen simply because of the belief that that’s what everyone else is doing, so your business needs to do the same to keep up. This approach doesn’t work because it isn’t customer-centric, and we’ve all heard about misinformed product or service upgrades that customers hate.
To establish and reinforce your competitive advantage, you must be able to scale operations to accommodate shifts in customer demand. This means your technology environment should be flexible and adaptable so new functions and features can be put into production as quickly as possible. This also applies to the systems your employees depend on to serve customers, such as scalable service portals and mobile platforms.
#2. Start with a top-down approach
Digital transformation requires a culture change. It’s not all about the IT department rolling out the latest shiny new upgrades and hoping everyone will take full advantage of them. Not only do your projects need a solid reasoning to support them – they also need people to champion them throughout your organisation. This will give you the solid foundation you need to scale your business now and tomorrow. Remember – digital transformation is as much about scaling your team as it is about scaling your technology.
Technology is only as effective as the people who support and use it. Establishing a forward-thinking mindset is essential for getting your team to adopt new technologies. While all digital transformations need leadership, it’s important to get buy-in from every other party concerned, whether that’s your employees, customers, investors, or partners. For example, you might run surveys or use gamification to increase engagement and feedback for your digital projects. Other examples include service catalogues, knowledgebases, mobile experiences, and virtual agents, all of which can help get employees up to speed quickly with new systems.
#3. Find ways to automate your operations
While people are the driving force behind any sustainable digital transformation project, data is the fuel. Every online interaction generates data which, when used the right way, can yield enormous insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your operations. Another great thing about data is it can automate decision-making and stop employees from getting overwhelmed by repetitive routine tasks.
There are still plenty of situations which are better off being handled by people, so employees should have time to focus on those rather than workflows which are better off being automated. For example, let’s say you have an automated workflow in place for onboarding new hires. Instead relying on slow-moving processes like in-person training and the usual back and forth with HR, you might provide an automated, repeatable process to get them up to speed quickly. Artificial intelligence and machine learning help automate operations at scale, thus enabling continuous improvement.
By now, we’ve all heard of customer experience and how it’s the fuel that breeds brand loyalty and empowers business growth. After all, as consumers, we’re all familiar with both good and bad customer experiences. But recent years have also started to see a change in workplace culture in which employees are also valued is critical enablers of business success. More than ever, it’s time to start thinking of your employees in the same terms as you think about your employees. Their experience in your organisation is where it all begins, which is why employee experience is the future of work.
#1. Reduce employee turnover
It typically costs upwards of half an employee’s average annual salary to replace them. While employee turnover isn’t always a bad thing, since it also involves replacing poor performers, a strong employee experience gives new hires a much better start at the company. It’s even more important these days now that workers have more opportunities than ever thanks to the rise of workforce mobility and the gig economy. Prioritising employee experience will help your business become more attractive to work for and to keep working for.
#2. Enhance workplace productivity
Engaged employees are more productive. By analysing their day-to-day experiences in your organisation, you can find opportunities for improvement. For example, if employees spend a lot of time on peripheral tasks they’re not best-equipped to deal with, they’ll be unable to focus on their core competencies. The same applies if your business processes, which are typically shaped around modern technology, are fraught with menial and repetitive tasks which can be automated.
#3. Overcome talent shortages
More than half of all organisations globally are reporting talent shortages. A big part of this is due to the fast pace of technology and the inability many of organisations to keep up with the constant change. While technological development has introduced many new challenges, as well as new jobs specialised in addressing them, it has also left many employees lamenting over dated and arcane processes in established businesses. Automating workflows is critical for enhancing employee experiences and getting more done with fewer resources.
#4. Improve customer experiences
If you don’t enjoy creating something, no one’s going to enjoy consuming it. The same applies in every facet of life and work, and customer experiences are no exception. If employees are engaged with their jobs and have the tools at their disposal to make them achieve their goals quickly, easily, and without compromising on quality, they’ll be far better equipped to live up to the expectations of their customers. If employee experience isn’t up to scratch, then people will end up doing their bare minimum at best, which inevitably leaves customers unfulfilled.
#5. Empower future growth
In the end, employee experience largely comes down to flexibility and adaptability. It’s about accommodating an increasingly wide variety of needs and enabling a better work/life balance in an age of constant distraction. The future of work depends on finding the right balance of technology, people, and process and giving employees the options they need to function at their very best. That’s why employee experience often comes down to eliminating repetitive workflows that are better of being automated, and providing the technology infrastructure that allows them to choose how, where, and when they work. Together, these factors help improve your organisation’s adaptability which, in turn, fuel growth in an unpredictable future.