Agility Is First and Foremost a Frame of Mind

Agility starts with a way of looking at the world; you need that worldview before you employ specific techniques or any particular collection of technologies. Agility starts with an ability to size up a situation in a timely manner, to see potential problems and opportunities, and to devise bold and simple ways to overcome the problems and seize the opportunities. 

Information technology is a large part of what makes a company agile, and it can also be a big part of what makes it a clumsy, slow-moving bureaucracy. One of the major determinants of this is the way your IT group answers the question, "Should we build our systems fast, or should we build them good?" The agile answer is to build them fast and good enough for now. 

[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics - mhugos@yahoo.com ]

Fast and Good Enough

What does "good enough for now" mean? Consider this: in a fast-paced, competitive world, opportunities arise quickly and then either fade away or evolve into something else. Advantage goes to companies that develop systems that are ready when the business needs them and don't cost more than the opportunity is worth. 

Agility means you are a master at identifying the repetitious things that people do. As companies grow, such routine work is often what overwhelms and bogs people down. The agile IT group learns to design and quickly roll out simple systems that automate this routine work. These systems are relatively inexpensive and quick to build because they don’t try to automate anything that isn't routine. 

I see this as a major paradigm shift. For the past 20 years or more, people in IT have dreaded questions like, "Yes, but what about this?" or, "Can your system handle that?" Those comments always focus on exceptions to the general rules that a system is built to handle. Often, they can stop new system development projects dead in their tracks. 

Fear of these questions causes IT people to add complexity and expense to otherwise simple systems in order to handle exceptions that happen only once in a while. In the past, such comments were often voiced by people who didn't like computers anyway and who were motivated to come up with ways to delay or stop the rollout of new systems. 

But times have changed; older people have gotten used to computers, and younger people can't imagine living without them. And everyone's workload has doubled or tripled. There's no longer any need to build complex systems to appease obstructionists, because there aren't that many of them left. And since workflows change quickly and the most complex workflows change the fastest, why spend a lot of time automating them? 

Automate the Routine and Free People to Focus on the Truly Complex

Instead, learn to see complexity as combinations of simple, repetitive tasks and automate the simplest and most repetitive of them. Figuratively speaking, people in many companies are often too busy mopping to fix the leak. So build cheap, simple systems to do the mopping and free people up to figure out why the leak is happening and how best to fix it. 

Once freed from the burden of routine tasks, people have time to do root-cause analysis and fix problems at the source. They also have time to be more responsive to unique customer needs. And when you serve customers well, they'll do business with you again. 

Companies win in several ways from using agile IT. First, there are the increased operating efficiencies and cost savings that come from automating routine tasks with simple, inexpensive systems. Then

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