In ecommerce, the race to improve business agility is fiercely competitive. When market growth slows, agility is particularly important for your chances of long-term success. Businesses that increase the agility of their enterprise architecture are better equipped to deliver customer value, foster innovation, and maintain resilience.
One significant barrier to increasing business agility is the reliance on inflexible, custom-built platforms. While they made a lot of sense 10 years ago, they’ve grown into rigid behemoths that hinder innovation and make it more difficult for brands to capitalize on new market opportunities.
In this article, we’ll review how we got to a place where custom platforms actually create barriers to innovation for brands—and how you can start to turn the tide with a few key strategies.
The benefits of agile business practices
Business agility is about more than IT systems. As the market has evolved, the agility framework has been extended, from agile software delivery to agile transformation and beyond. Companies are now looking for an even more holistic strategy that encompasses the entire enterprise—hence enterprise business agility.
Agile businesses focus on delivering customer value by continuously refining their offerings and leveraging feedback from potential customers. Additionally, agile practices encourage experimentation, helping companies to explore new opportunities and improve performance. Businesses migrating from custom platforms to Shopify, for instance, often reduce their operational costs significantly while gaining the flexibility to choose between the full platform, going headless, or using Liquid (Shopify’s open-source template language).
Barriers to achieving business agility
Enterprise ecommerce brands struggle to balance scalability with flexibility. Their leaders often feel like they need to choose between the two, but the right infrastructure can support a wide range of API capabilities, delivering flexibility without sacrificing scalability. Understanding this is the first step in building a more resilient organization.
Even with this knowledge, key barriers to achieving business agility remain:
High maintenance costs: Custom platforms often require significant resources for upkeep. For example, before migrating to Shopify, Dollar Shave Club spent nearly 40% of its tech budget on maintaining its platform, diverting critical funds from growth initiatives and innovation.
Lack of flexibility in custom systems: Custom solutions frequently lack the adaptability needed to respond to shifting market demands. Prolonged update cycles and rigid architectures make it difficult to implement agile transformation initiatives or adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
Security and compliance issues: Businesses reliant on outdated technology face increased risks from cybersecurity threats and compliance requirements. Ensuring secure systems that meet evolving regulations is critical for maintaining trust and protecting customer data.
Optimizing processes for agility
To improve business agility, companies have begun optimizing business processes with a focus on efficiency, flexibility, and delivering customer value. This involves simplifying workflows and automating repetitive tasks to free up resources, helping teams to focus on strategic objectives.
Empowering cross-functional teams to prioritize collaboration and decision-making is also vital. This fosters innovation and problem-solving, so the organization can adapt to evolving demands. Finally, agile businesses focus on delivering customer value by aligning their processes with customer needs. This improves customer satisfaction, and drives loyalty.
By integrating simpler workflows, empowered teams and customer-centric processes, businesses can enhance their agility and create a solid foundation for growth.
What Shopify lets us do is spin up all these different experiences to rapidly test, iterate, and drive additional performance as far as acquisition is concerned.
How to boost business agility
To succeed in today’s dynamic environment, we’ve seen businesses adopt a few practical strategies to improve their agility. Here are five steps for boosting business agility:
1. Evaluate your current technology stack
Assess whether your existing systems enable or hinder adaptability. Legacy and custom platforms often create bottlenecks, making it essential to invest in scalable, modern solutions.
2. Migrate to a modular platform
Platforms like Shopify provide modular tools that allow businesses to efficiently adapt and scale. Modular platforms allow businesses to integrate new features seamlessly, scale operations efficiently, and respond to market changes with agility.
3. Leverage prebuilt integrations
Modern platforms offer ecosystems filled with prebuilt apps and integrations that reduce the need for costly custom development. By utilizing these tools, businesses can implement solutions faster and allocate resources to innovation rather than troubleshooting.
4. Focus on core business growth
Redirect resources from maintaining outdated systems to enhancing customer experience and developing innovative solutions. For instance, Daily Harvest achieved scalable growth by prioritizing business opportunities over system upkeep.
5. Enhance security and compliance
Modern platforms provide built-in security features, ensuring compliance with regulations and safeguarding sensitive data. Robust security measures not only reduce risks but also build customer trust, a critical factor in long-term success.
Click here to talk with sales about Shopify plans for enterprisesBuilding a culture of agility
Business agility is more than a strategy—it’s a mindset embedded in an organization’s culture. But changing organizational culture is a tall order, and won’t happen overnight. Even your decision to buy an ecommerce platform rather than build your own can seriously impact culture. Before moving away from their custom platform, Dollar Shave Club was spending 40% of their entire technology budget on platform maintenance.
By switching to Shopify, Dollar Shave Club freed time for experimentation and reinjected autonomy back into the dev team’s culture. In this way, a simple but important strategic decision improved business agility.
Leadership’s role in driving business agility
Leadership plays a crucial role in driving transformation by fostering a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. By encouraging experimentation, promoting decision-making autonomy, and valuing diverse perspectives, leaders can create a workplace that thrives on adaptability. The investment of time and resources is worth it. Embedding flexibility into the culture prepares you for tackling market challenges head-on.
With that 40%, we thought to ourselves, what else could we unlock? What else could we do with that 40% instead of simply maintaining our platform? What else could we build? What else could we leverage? How could we drive more results in those primary KPIs?
Leveraging business intelligence
Business intelligence is an indispensable tool for sustaining and extending business agility. By analyzing customer behavior, operational trends, and market data, businesses can develop informed strategies to optimize value streams and meet evolving demands.
Business intelligence helps brands measure success, develop and test new strategies, and identify new opportunities in real time, supporting quicker and more informed decisions. For example, NatWest Group reduced their product governance time from 4.5 days to less than 20 minutes by leveraging business intelligence tools.
Data-driven intelligence helps organizations align with changing market conditions and deliver superior customer experiences. In short, it continuously boosts your agility. These types of self-sustaining benefits are invaluable to your business. Once established, they are worth protecting.
Sustaining business agility for long-term success
Agility is not a one-time achievement—it requires ongoing effort and investment. Companies have begun focusing on measuring agility through key performance indicators such as speed, flexibility, and innovation.
Platforms like Shopify offer a foundation for scalable, adaptable growth, helping businesses to remain ahead of the curve. Take the first step toward a more agile future today—your customers and your business will thank you.
FAQ on increasing business agility
What does it mean to increase business agility?
Increasing business agility means a company can adapt quickly to changes in the market and business environment:
- Adaptability: Being able to quickly change strategies, products, and services to meet customer needs and market trends
- Operational flexibility: Being able to quickly adjust operations, processes, structures, and systems
- Customer-centricity: Making customer needs and value a key priority
- Creating value: Creating value for all stakeholders, including employees, investors, partners, and the community
How do you develop business agility?
To develop business agility, you should train cross-functional teams on agile methodologies, embrace change, foster a culture of experimentation, commit to continuously learning, leverage data and analytics, implement low-cost testing and prototyping, and use a workflow management method.
What are the seven competencies of business agility?
The seven core competencies of business agility are:
- Organizational agility: Builds adaptability across the organization
- Lean portfolio management: Aligns strategy and execution using Lean and systems thinking
- Enterprise solution delivery: Supports development and evolution of large-scale systems and networks
- Agile product delivery: Allows the building, defining, and releasing of products and services in a continuous flow
- Team and technical agility: Delivers solutions that meet customer needs
- Continuous learning culture: Promotes a culture of continuous improvement
- Lean-agile leadership: Helps leaders drive organizational transformation
What are the four components of business agility?
There are four mutually enforcing elements of organizational agility—leadership, culture, architecture and careers:
- Leadership Agility: A holistic approach to leading and managing complex change that requires an ability to manage paradox and use head, heart, hands and spirit in service of business transformation
- Cultural Agility: The ability to coach and to have conversations that connect, building shared clarity, emotional connection and visible commitment in a diverse organization
- Business Agility: The structural, physical and operational flexibility, speed and efficiency, which will also support creativity and innovation. Typically, this will entail moving towards flexible organization structures and operating models.
- Career Agility: The agile talent and performance system that will support individual aspiration and boundary-free, agile careers.
