Organizational agility through data-driven strategic and operational planning

The hyper-complexity of the new post-COVID-19 Era and its consequences call for a revolution in the way organizations operate, making it vital that they be “agile” and “data-driven” in their strategic and operational planning in order to respond to new scenarios and act instantly according to unpredictable changes in their environment. The new imperatives and the lack of preparation that leaders seem to display in the post-COVID-19 era, questioning the quality and relevance of society's complex systems for value creation that organizations represent, make it essential that they assume the commitment to operationalize organizational agility - establishing it as a need for survival and flourishing in an uncertain, volatile, and fast-changing environment. For this reason, they need to transpose organizational agility from the realm of rhetoric to the practical operations of the organization, making it tangible from a structural-infrastructural, methodological, cultural-behavioral, and technical perspective (McAfee et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2015; Mikalef et al., 2019). This chapter focuses on the process of conducting re-framing through design thinking and how to link the opportunities generated and captured through design thinking to the organizational data universe. Based on that input, the goal is to implement in an integrated manner the data-driven constructs through which the organization transforms its strategy and operations at a dual level, to generate and capture value. The resulting snapshot is the basis for developing strategic-type documents within the framework of data strategy and aligning operational business plans with data-driven projects. These documents and plans have the dual purpose of defining the organization’s vertical and horizontal levels, and its ability to operate at the desired level with predictable results, in an alignment process between strategic and operational planning.