Wednesday 5 October 2011

Business Agility

Time to breathe life back into my dormant blog! It's been a while - been buried helping many of my clients understand what it takes to become more agile.

One of the most enjoyable engagements has been helping Danske Bank transition to agile (see here) with a whole bunch of individuals for whom failure was never an option - both within the bank and within IBM. I'll be discussing success patterns in transforming a development organization at the UK Innovate event next week, if you're able to come along.

But this blog entry was actually prompted by a Twitter feed from @ibmrational who asked me "We'd love your input on what it means for a business to be ". The question is, itself, quite interesting since it's focused on business agility, and not IT agility, and rightly so.

And so my first observation is that business agility is much more than IT. To pick a non-IT example, business agility might be delivered through the ability to onboard partner organizations and suppliers more quickly, in order to respond to a market opportunity.

However, the second observation is that (for many organizations) IT is a critical aspect of their business, without which they would simply go out of business. The ability for IT to respond to business demands can make or break them. A very real example in the financial sector is the ability to change existing systems, quickly, in response to new regulations. In these cases, where business and IT go hand in hand, IT agility is inextricably linked to business agility.

The obvious next question is how IT becomes more agile. The growing consensus is that this is not just driven by process, but by architecture too. Watch this space :)