The Agile Enterprise: Current Thinking

Aug 17, ’10 10:14 AM

Following is a curated list of resources that reflect current thinking on a topic of interest to IT leaders. You can assist this effort by contributing insight from your own real-world experiences here.

Definitions

Gartner: Defining, Cultivating and Measuring Enterprise Agility

we define agility as “the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change.” Sensing the need for change also includes the proactive initiation of change. This is a simple definition to start the discourse, but a concept such as agility needs flesh beyond the bare-bones definition. The remainder of our definitional research explains why agility is emerging as a critical topic, how agility fits within the context of IT, why an agility cycle is the best approach to managing your agile action, and why the human factor (people issues) may be the biggest impediment to success with your efforts.

Business agility – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Agility is a concept that incorporates the ideas of flexibility, balance, adaptability, and coordination under one umbrella. In a business context, agility typically refers to the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. The agile enterprise is an extension of this concept, referring to an organization that utilizes key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success.

Business-Agile Enterprise – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Business-Agile Enterprise (B-AE) is a business architecture that combines and extends the concepts of a real time enterprise, agile software development and business agility. A B-AE is a company that has mastered the interrelationships between business and Information Technology (IT) of resiliency, agility and innovation. It uses these interdependencies as a way to attain competitive advantage, industry leadership and improved financial results.

SearchCIO: Robert Kaplan discusses agile business and risk management

To be agile is the ability to sense changes in the markets and customer preferences faster, as they are evolving, and be able to respond to it. It’s not just information, but it’s really analysis to see patterns in customers’ purchasing decisions and preferences and have that [data] come into the company so they can respond to whatever these evolving needs are. It’s also keeping track of competitive forces as well, to be able to offset that. But the front end of agility is information because it’s what you’re being agile with respect to. It’s not just that you’re doing things within the company faster. It has to really respond to some market need.

[+] suggest

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

The Hiring Process Speaks Louder Than You Do

May 14, ’10 9:52 AM

I recently came across a good post on the on-boarding process for executives, and how it is often given short shrift in organizations, to the detriment of the new leader.

In my experience, staffing routinely goes off the rails much earlier than that, during the hiring process itself. A prospective team member may learn much more about you (and your organization) through experiencing your actual hiring process than what is said in the interviews themselves, or from the slick information packet put together by the folks in HR.

Following are a few areas where the language found in the position description may be discounted by the actual process candidates experience:

Speed of Hiring Process: You are in a competitive, fast-moving industry.Your business customers expect a lot from IT and therefore you expect a great deal from your leaders. You’ve filtered initial resumes to those candidates that can demonstrate decisiveness in an environment of constant change, with quick successes under their belt. Yet your hiring process for key people might average three months from start to finish. Your HR recruiter may be gracious enough to give the candidate a heads-up to expect as much. If, after four interviews the candidate pushes to get a sense of where things are at or move the process along, you may even get a little testy with them.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

The False Choice Between Enterprise IT and Startup IT

Apr 16, ’10 1:00 PM

There is much to like in the new book Rework, from the founders of 37signals. The book, geared toward small businesses, startups and entrepreneurs, is a collection of common-sense and (self-described) contrarian views on everything from the work hours necessary to be successful when starting a business…

“Send people home at 5…You don’t need more hours, you need better hours.”

to the need to focus on building your company rather than on external financing or the minuscule odds of making a big payoff someday…

“You need a commitment strategy, not an exit strategy. You should be thinking about how to make your project grow and succeed, not how you’re going to jump ship. If your whole strategy is based on leaving, chances are you won’t get far in the first place.”

Much of the commentary on the book has centered around whether the success of 37signals as an independent, profitable software operation is applicable to the majority of small and internet-focused businesses.

For me, the book is one more data point confirming a theory I have held for sometime; that we are moving toward an environment in which there really are two “camps” of IT professionals (and IT shops). On one extreme are enterprise IT and those within it, and on the other startups and small businesses. As in most tribalism, each extreme is easily painted with incorrect stereotypes, and a false choice is presented between them – you can belong to one camp or the other, but not both. Its easy to look across the chasm at the other side and make little effort to understand their real challenges or what might be learned from them. If an individual moves between camps, it is very likely by leaving the enterprise world for the small-business world, never to look back.

Continue Reading… Comments (2)