ESM key to building the anti-fragile business of the future

Innovative ideas and great product and service delivery are no longer enough to differentiate a business and ensure its survival – now, businesses must tie their operations together and focus on micro gains in order to survive and thrive.

This is according to Chris Visagie, CTO of UnlimitIT, and Dewald du Plessis, COO of UnlimitIT, who were speaking ahead of Realize 2022, Micro Focus’s biggest customer event of the year. UnlimiIT will be a track sponsor and presenter at the event, outlining how businesses should adapt to become anti-fragile.

Visagie says the pace of business change, and fast-growing competition across all sectors, mean that the old business differentiators are no longer enough: “Once, all you needed was a good idea, and you had a business. Later you had to innovate using technology to differentiate products and service delivery. We saw the emergence of a new type of CEO who understood that business needed to act much faster, and they became good at adopting DevOps. What we see now is that even this is no longer good enough,” he says.

“You can be on top of good ideas and the way you go to market, but so are all your competitors. It has become very difficult to differentiate and grow any business – particularly as customer loyalty evaporates. As competition gets tougher, many organisations look at cost-cutting through automation, but there is a limit to how many cost-saving measures an organisation can implement before these become counter-productive. What many are missing is the value of micro gains to be achieved internally, which have the compounded effect of pushing up profit and share value.

“The next push is to tie everything together and focus on marginal gains throughout the business, all its operations and its supply chain. The way to do that is through Enterprise Service Management (ESM),” Visagie says.

Du Plessis explains that ESM encompasses a great deal more than IT service management, call desks or support desks. “ESM is becoming more important than ERP platforms. The advantage – and the problem for business – is that ESM involves the whole business. It’s not an IT thing, it’s a business thing. Organisations need ESM to bridge the gaps between products, services, go to market, and how the business gets things done, giving management a clear view across the business, with insight into where the problems are and what their impact is. They need to identify and harness the micro gains to become more competitive and differentiate their businesses. Those businesses that get it right will continue to exist in future, and those that can’t, will disappear virtually overnight,” he says.

As trusted advisors to leading enterprises, UnlimitIT will speak at Realize on how businesses can turn inefficiencies into efficiencies to improve resilience and profits by harnessing gains to be achieved across all frameworks and functions in ESM.

Under the theme ‘Solve your digital dilemma’, Micro Focus Realize 2022 will take place at Langhams Lifestyle Estate in Johannesburg on 15 September. 

Realize is designed as a ‘solve for’ conference, where a select group of customers will discover how to balance today’s needs with tomorrow’s opportunities; and both run the business while also transforming. 

The event will feature eight customer speakers, four strategic partner speakers and four panel discussions, with tracks focused on critical themes including business resilience, cloud, automation & analytics,  and DevSecOps.