Strategies for becoming a Dynamic Enterprise

One year ago, Alcatel-Lucent launched its vision for The Dynamic Enterprise. Since that time, the business world has changed more dramatically than anyone predicted. Yet the principles of The Dynamic Enterprise are unaffected by economic cycles as they address the only constants in your business: to make money and save money.

Let’s take a step back a moment. Keeping a business moving forward is all about transformation; adapting and refining your approach in the face of a continually changing world. However, while your priorities evolve, your business imperatives remain resolutely constant: to make money and to save money. In an economic downturn, such as we are facing today, this doesn’t change.
In order to survive and thrive in 2009, organizations must strike a balance between reducing costs (save money) and investing in business innovation to drive top line growth (make money). In The Dynamic Enterprise, communications both enable and contribute to this balancing act.

Becoming a Dynamic Enterprise
The Dynamic Enterprise brings together its core assets of network, people, process and knowledge, connecting the right person to the right information in real-time. It leverages the collective knowledge of its extended network of employees, partners and customers to react rapidly to business conditions. The Dynamic Enterprise gains a competitive advantage by driving down operational costs while fueling business innovation and future growth.

As every company is different, every path to becoming a dynamic enterprise is different. Yet, as the ultimate goal is the same – interconnecting your core assets – there are some common strategies that can be followed to reach this goal. These strategies build on your existing investment and create a smooth evolutionary path to the communications architecture of the future, providing a compelling ROI argument to support your business imperatives.

You can choose the strategies you want to embrace. There is no order. Each will allow you to interconnect some and, over time, all of your core assets, turning your company into a dynamic enterprise.

Strategy 1: Simplify communications with unbound networks
Addressing the network, Alcatel-Lucent solutions allow you to simplify your communications. Centralized, flexible and virtualized architectures mean fewer discrete elements in your network, thus reducing CAPEX. Centralized network management improves the performance of the network and reduces OPEX. And Alcatel-Lucent award-winning switches have the lowest power consumption figures on the market, both reducing energy costs and contributing to your eco-sustainability targets.



Strategy 2: Drive business performance with connected knowledge
As all business processes rely on the transfer of knowledge from point A to point B, making more knowledge available and allowing faster connection to it is the key to driving innovation and business performance.
In a 2008 report1, Forrester Research introduced the notion of “knowledge continuity”, arguing that those companies that best enable knowledge sharing will gain a significant competitive advantage.

The adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications allows the information that hitherto resided in your employees’ heads to become structured and searchable. Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) technology does the same for your process systems, databases and document repositories. What remains is to ensure a communications environment that gives unrestricted access to this knowledge. Real-time, context-driven communications – which leverage the presence, location and knowledge or skill-sets of your employees – provide the required level of access by ensuring the right connection to the right person, at the right time. Examples include unified communications applications with rich presence and rich media functionality, and collaboration tools that even allow company knowledge to be enhanced. Mobility solutions complete the picture by extending access to anywhere in the world, any time you like.

Collaborate, Innovate, Accelerate
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have… It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.”2 To expand on this quote from Steve Jobs, your employees and what they know are the keys to your innovation, and hence your business growth. Fostering innovation therefore begins with valuing people and their networks, then enabling them with always-on, user-driven, open communications and collaboration. The communications capabilities achieved by becoming a dynamic enterprise allow your employees to overcome organizational, geographical, technological and time barriers to accommodate both real time, rich interactions and longer term asynchronous interactions.
2 Steve Jobs, Founder and CEO of Apple - Fortune magazine, November 9th, 1998.

Strategy 3: Strengthen relationships with a superior customer experience
The contact center experience can make or break a customer’s relationship with an enterprise. The Dynamic Enterprise delivers an enriched customer experience that considers the enterprise-customer relationship as a whole.

You must speak the same language as your customers – whether it’s instant messaging, chat, video, web self-service or the more traditional voice, e-mail and fax. Supporting newer media channels makes it easier for customers to do business with you. Integrated collaboration tools let contact center agents access enterprise knowledge while an intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) provides contextual assistance that takes customers well beyond the traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) experience. These kinds of application deliver an enriched customer experience that increases loyalty and retains customers.

Alcatel-Lucent: enabling the Dynamic Enterprise
Whether you address one or all of these challenges, you are moving towards the ultimate goal of becoming a Dynamic Enterprise. Your core assets – your network, your people, your process and your knowledge – become highly interconnected, allowing you to gain competitive advantage regardless of the economic climate.
1“Knowledge Continuity, the Next Information Workplace Frontier”, R. Kolpowitz, Forrester Research, 2008.