Home Seven BetsResilient agility

The trend: Reglobalization, reskilling, and new partnerships are transforming value chains

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Leaders need to navigate several disruptive forces.

The social, political, and economic environment we live in is undergoing a radical transformation, impacting trade, talent, and the drivers of success.

48%

of global CSCOs report increased design and collaboration with partners

40%

of skills could need updating by 2025

Our insights

The era of stable inflation and geopolitical relationships is gone for the foreseeable future. Relationships between nations are shifting. And according to the World Economic Forum’s 2023 Global Risks Report, “Geopolitical fragmentation will drive geoeconomic warfare and heighten the risk of multi-domain conflicts.”

In response, global supply chains are becoming shorter and more segmented. Governments are fast-tracking legislation to incentivize local production. Businesses are rearranging supply contracts and manufacturing capacity, turning to “re-shoring,” “friend-shoring,” and otherwise diversifying their operations. The imperative is a resilient and responsive system that can absorb significant change and uncertainty.

Moving to a multidisciplinary skills framework will be needed to help organizations close the skills gap. Research from LinkedIn found that, on average, 25% of the skills required for a specific job changed between 2015 and 2021. At this pace, between 40% of skills could need updating by 2025.

Cross-skilling employees allows them to major and minor in a portfolio of skills, empowering teams to work in a more agile manner. This will be critical as in-demand skills remain scarce.

In a fractured, fast-shifting world, no single company owns innovation—or will always have all the answers. Success has become less about reinventing the enterprise and more about reinventing the ecosystem.

Collaboration also increases resilience and agility, as partners can help leaders see what’s coming down the pike. Recent research from the IBM Institute for Business Value found that roughly half (48%) of global CSCOs report increased design and collaboration with partners to increase flexibility across the supply chain. Sharing resources and information in real time helps boost performance, in part, by making it easier to manage complexity.

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Meet the authors

John Granger, Senior Vice President, IBM Consulting

Jesus Mantas, Senior Managing Partner, IBM Consulting

Salima Lin, Vice President and Senior Partner, Strategy, Transformation, and Thought Leadership, IBM

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Originally published 08 May 2023

The priorities

In a time of challenge and change, rethinking legacy practices and embracing a new set of priorities, which encompass agility, predictive technology, and open innovation, will drive competitive advantage.

When the IBM Institute for Business Value surveyed CEOs about their priorities for the next two to three years, aggressively pursuing operational agility and flexibility was cited more than any other action. This requires investment—and bravery—to create entirely new ways of working. Investing in emerging technologies, such as hybrid cloud and AI, can optimize agility, enhance scalability, and accelerate the data-driven insights that help leaders respond to disruption and change.

Almost half (47%) of global CSCOs said generating more accurate forecasts is a top priority for the next two to three years. That means using near-real-time data, analytics, and AI to proactively run their businesses. Virtualization, simulation, and predictive technology can help executives anticipate and respond to change. Generative AI makes building 3D digital twins much faster, and simulation software can help a virtual factory evaluate hundreds of scenarios before acting on any of them.

Companies that open the door to closer collaboration can gain a competitive edge. One study from the IBM Institute for Business Value found organizations that focus on “openness” or “ecosystems” in their technology adoption see revenue growth that is 40% higher than their competitors. Success is now based less on enterprise-to-enterprise competition, and more on ecosystem-to-ecosystem engagement: 84% of executives say open innovation is important for their future growth strategy. Ecosystem engagement relies on building partnerships that leverage other organizations’ innovation dollars and talent to enhance your own. In fact, IBM Institute for Business Value research found that three out of four CEOs say ecosystem partners are essential for their talent and skills strategy.

The bet

Simplify, digitize, and partner to build a resilient enterprise

Actions to take

This is a time for bold change: eliminate non-value-adding tasks. Simplify operating models, and automate management systems across the organization. Shift more costs from fixed to variable.

Digitize end-to-end workflows. Implement “digital-first” solutions to increase efficiency, engage talent, and develop new skills.

Break down jobs into collections of tasks, and decide which of those tasks can be aided or automated with AI. Redefine the jobs and reskilling strategy based on the tasks less likely to be automated, and implement AI that reduces people’s low-value transactional burden.

Adopt open-source collaboration practices inside the enterprise, de-risking and lowering the cost of innovation. Implement skills-sharing platforms to create internal markets for talent to flow to their most productive jobs.

Leverage digital credentials to find talent with verifiable capability based on demonstrated application of skills, rather than relying on self-assessments or manager endorsements.

Outsource non-core functions to digitally enabled partners to better navigate the ebbs and flows of the business cycle.

Evaluate the strength of your partners—and whether they are part of the winning ensemble in this new environment. Invest in the few that will make a difference.

Strengthen the organization’s ability to manage strategic partnerships for mutual success.

Increase security at every point in the ecosystem by adopting zero trust security practices.

See the bet in action

Autostrade per l’Italia drives simplicity with virtualization

MOVYON is a leader in the development and integration of intelligent transport system solutions—and a center of excellence for research and innovation at Autostrade per l’Italia.

Autostrade per l’Italia adopts MOVYON’s technology solutions to help manage and maintain its approximately 3,000 km of highways, keeping them safe for drivers. Autostrade per l’Italia also manages more than 1,900 bridges and viaducts, nearly 1,800 overpasses, and 574 tunnels throughout Italy.

MOVYON turned to IBM Consulting to help create a new type of infrastructure management solution that the two companies could offer to other roadway operators.

“Our role was to integrate these technologies and, together with IBM, create something that didn’t exist before,” says Lorenzo Rossi, Chief Executive Officer at MOVYON.

The IBM Consulting team worked with MOVYON to design a comprehensive solution enhanced by AI for a smarter approach to infrastructure management.

The platform, known as Argo, communicates in real time with IoT sensors. The solution also includes a simplified building information modeling (BIM) technology model of bridges and viaducts generated from the data available in the Argo solution.

The project also defined a new, digital inspection process for field operators. It enables multidevice access through a mobile app. The app lets technicians view a simplified 3D model of the bridge, comparing it to the structure in front of them and ensuring that they inspect each part.

IBM and MOVYON put the Argo platform into production in just 18 months. It now helps Autostrade per l’Italia monitor, manage, and maintain infrastructure assets, predict failures, and prioritize repairs across the 4,000 bridges, viaducts, and flyovers of the Autostrade per l’Italia network.