Doing Business in Real Time
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The global economy has a life of its own, it lives in real-time, and we are all part of it. Hello brave new world.
When the Going gets Tough, the Tough get Agile
When it’s clear the old ways don’t work then it’s time to try something new
The agile movement is steadily gaining momentum in the IT world and it’s spreading into the business world as well. We know slow moving bureaucratic processes don't work for business development any better than the slow moving waterfall process works for software development. People are interested to see if agile practices offer better results.
Given the tough times we’re going through it’s easy to see why people are talking about agility. Being in favor of agility is like being in favor of eating healthy and working out regularly. Why wouldn’t we favor such things? The question though is this, “What the heck does agility actually mean?”
Definition of Agility
A meaningful definition of business agility or IT agility has to address two main points. The first point is what agility can deliver and thus why an organization would want to be agile. The second point is what an organization has to do and what changes it has to make in order to become agile. If we have a working definition that covers these points then we can have an inclusive conversation between business and technical people. And that conversation will be a powerful driver for achieving agility.
IT agility has come about as a response to the well known and well documented inability of traditional software development processes to successfully deliver the new systems that companies require. Numerous industry studies find that the success rate of software development projects has been in the 25 – 30 percent range for the last 15 years or more. We can argue around the edges of this finding and shift percentages a few points one way or the other, but the fact of a near 70 percent failure rate on system development projects sits there in the center of the room like the 800 pound gorilla. So groups of system developers are learning and applying agile development practices and delivering impressive success rates because of it.
Business agility is now coming about because of the inability of traditional business operating models to deliver the value to society and the profits to investors that they once did. Events of the last two years have presented us with a clear challenge in these areas. Businesses must earn a profit, but if the only way they can do so is by reducing their number of employees, then they are caught in a downward spiral of continuing layoffs in the face of downward trending sales - fueled by continuing layoffs.
Engines of Prosperity
We all sense that agility has something to do with how to get out of this downward spiral. Perhaps there are some lessons and analogies from IT agility that can be applied to business agility. Perhaps there are already some companies where business agility is more than just a slogan. Perhaps there are companies discovering how to combine people and information systems so as to create value and profits and set up a cycle of growth instead of continuing the cycle of contraction.
The pace of change and the level of unpredictability in the global real time economy create conditions and challenges not seen in the slow moving and more predictable industrial economy of the last century. Yet these same conditions also open up new opportunities. Companies that figure out how to structure themselves and motivate their people to constantly sense and respond to change will earn the “agility dividend”. This agility dividend comes about by continuous adjustments to improve existing products and services and by timely launching of new products and services when opportunities arise. Companies that learn to do this will be the new
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