The current economy is fueling a constant stream of new startup companies that are disrupting industries with their ability to combine products and services in new ways, deliver them very quickly, and make them easily accessible through technology. Business agility is not just a worthy goal in today’s economy, it is vital for long-term survival.
To remain competitive a business must be able to continuously develop new products or services that delight customers. The process a company uses to development new products or services is the lifeblood of a company’s heartbeat. The goal of the product development process is to produce a unique and different result from anything that has been produced before. If the result of the process is a solution that is sufficiently different in a way that adds incremental value for a customer, the process will be considered successful. If the result of the development process doesn’t produce incremental value – like a new product feature – it is at best, valuable learning opportunity. Of course, a customer can be defined in many ways other than the purchaser of goods or services.
Some organizations make the mistake of treating the development process as another aspect of the manufacturing process. The goal of manufacturing process is to repeatedly produce a product the same way with as little variability as economically possible. I once got into a debate with an internal audit manager because he was insistent that we should be able to control the level of quality of our development process through compliance to policy.
The product development process is inherently highly variable and involves calculated risk taking. Many companies accept the risk of a high percentage of their development efforts failing so they can realize a significant payoff for a select few. The development of a product or solution can involve the design of a physical device, electronic components, software components, or the workflow of delivering a service. The optimal development process effectively manages variability to produce a solution that optimizes future benefit for the least amount of investment of time and resources. The goal of optimizing the development process is not to minimize variability and risk, but instead effectively managing it to produce the right solution, at the right cost, at the right quality, at the right time. “At the right time” means responding to customer demand as it manifests.
Organizational agility is measured by the time it takes for an organization to execute an optimal development process from idea to implementation. In agile speak – from concept to cash. So then, my definition of an agile IT organization…
An agile IT organization is a business entity that is focused on relentlessly optimizing their process of developing technology-based solutions that contribute to the overall ability for the company to quickly and continuously deliver new products or services to the marketplace.
I cannot think of any current industry where the most relevant businesses are not dependent to a significant degree on effectively utilizing technology to connect to their customers. It follows that for a business to remain relevant and competitive, it must be able to deliver IT solutions quickly and gracefully as integral part of their development process. At the most basic level, an IT leader has the ultimate job of ensuring that their peers that run the day-to-day operations of the business understand the interdependency between business agility and IT agility.
It should be every leader’s mission, no matter what organization or business unit they manage, to ensure their company relentlessly improves its level of business agility. This agility should be 100% focused on providing value to their customers. Companies that have executives entrenched in legacy thinking will struggle to remain relevant. The mission of relentless improvement in business agility should drive any agile transformation initiative from the outside in.
The Agile (IT) Organization 