An Intelligent Operating Model is data-driven and capable of continual evolution. It provides organizations with the agility and resilience to swiftly adapt their capabilities and resources to meet changing strategic priorities, withstand market disruption and capture new opportunities. An intelligent operating model is digital at its core, underpinned by technology and guided by purpose.

The pandemic accelerated the pace of disruption and has fundamentally altered customer behaviors and re-shaped markets. Organizational agility and resiliency are increasingly critical to helping companies deal with these changes. The majority of executives now feel they need to completely re-think their operating models, while over 90% fear their companies’ very existence is jeopardized by operating models that can’t keep pace.

Accenture has identified five characteristics essential to gaining organizational agility. Human: Design around the needs of employees, consumers, and stakeholders, with a focus on continuous learning for your people. Liquid: Build structures that seamlessly access people, processes, systems, and assets from across the ecosystem. Enhanced: Provide the practices and skills to ensure humans and machines enhance one another. Living: Implement new, more flexible ways of structuring and organizing work to adapt to the market through, nimble, self-organized teams. Modular: Create independent, discrete businesses or capabilities that can be “plugged and played,” supporting multiple operating models that respond faster to your customers.

There is no one-size-fits all answer. Leaders need to find the model that serves their strategy and organizational context. By effective use of data insights and transforming work practices, processes and systems, organizations can gain agility and resilience, be more responsive to customers and better positioned to achieve sustainable growth into the future.