In our Accelerated Now series, which published in April of 2022, the DXC Leading Edge team chronicled a world that is more digitally connected and moves faster than ever. We depicted methods that blend business approaches and technology seamlessly to adapt, adopt and innovate for business agility and growth.

We focused on five change vectors to guide leaders (Table 1).  

Investing wisely in a hybrid technology world

Make the right investment choices when planning business transformation by enhancing situational awareness of the competitive environment.

Mastering platform-driven business

Flow with new ideas, enhancements and a deep understanding of customers to accommodate their demand for instantly-available digital products and services.

Boosting data metabolism to improve decision making

Digest data and glean actionable insights to act on risk-reward criteria.

Committing to the human experience

Optimize business agility and performance by understanding factors including people’s relationship with technology.

Achieving (truly) sustainable sustainability

Flourish in this economy and meet ESG commitments by digitizing the circular economy.

Table 1. The Accelerated Now — Five factors of change for business agility

The relevance of the Accelerated Now’s five pillars is enduring, and we will continue to focus on how to “invest, master, boost, commit and achieve” while surfing the changing tides executives find their organizations facing. As the COVID-19 pandemic wanes, we face renewed pressures on multiple stages: the war in Ukraine, the fragile economy, Ebola’s return to Africa, difficult and politically fraught energy decisions, and weather and climate disasters that cause billions of dollars in losses.  These events aren’t just news, they are forces that shape our world view and decision calculus.

Amid troubling issues, exponential technologies have the potential to reshape organizations. People and processes are trying to bring value and values into alignment. Executives, boards, employees and stakeholders want to create businesses that can achieve that “flow” state where things just click — culture, values and effort are all in sync. In this state, platforms and pipelines can work together to enable businesses to learn at scale and achieve results in cyclic evolution.  

The Accelerated Now: Fast Forward

Moving forward DXC Leading Edge will be delving into our customers’ key questions that evolve the current platform. We’ve coalesced everything into three themes:

 

 

Creating sustainable strategic advantage 

How can you engineer businesses for the platform-defined world, where software is central to everything the organization does? 

What’s the path to products, services and ecosystems that make new markets across more autonomous, flatter organizations?

How can you design a new executive mindset that doubles down on collaboration while leveraging the power of data, AI and analytics?

How do organizations undertake fast pivots in executive decision making when needed so that you can build scale?

 

Driving sustainable operational advantage

How will you leverage new understandings around technology and deeper insights on supply chains to make smarter decisions?

How can you design novel solutions to thorny business problems?

What options do you have to increase visibility and flexibility, and reduce the costs of technical debt to drive modernization to enable growth?

How will you balance the different expectations of shareholders and stakeholders to become more sustainable?

 

Managing a favorable forward transition

What new forms of leadership and new approaches to work overall will be required to manage talent, skills and change?

What are effective paths to combining human ingenuity and technical prowess?

Is it possible to embrace automation and authenticity?

How do you create the right paths for organizational knowledge management and learning at scale?

 

Over the coming weeks, DXC Leading Edge researchers, strategists, advisors and industry experts will share with you our perspectives on these issues in a series of blogs. We hope you’ll connect with us on LinkedIn and offer your thoughts to help shape our work going forward. Send us a message if there is a topic in which you’re keen to participate; you can aid in our research through interviews or by sharing experiences. Also keep an eye on our LinkedIn page to find out about our upcoming advisory workshops and executive roundtables.

Thanks in advance for coming along on the journey.