Doing Business in Real Time

About this Blog:

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.

Michael Hugos

Three Laws of Business and IT Agility

Three things to think about when considering if your company needs to be agile

to Development |

There seem to be three laws that govern the practice of business and IT agility. The first one defines why we need to be agile, the second one identifies how to best achieve agility, and the third one shows where agility can yield the greatest results.

To begin with, agility is no longer just a good idea; it’s backed by law, the law of probability. This law says if a company can’t keep up with rapid rates of change in the world then its probability of success is getting smaller and smaller every day. And since companies need IT infrastructure and applications to operate just as our bodies need nervous systems and muscles to move, IT agility is required if a company is going to achieve business agility.

Effective support of business agility is the main reason these days for a company to have an internal IT group (versus outsourcing it all). IT groups need to figure out how to quickly deliver systems to give companies what they need to suceed. If internal IT groups can't do this; if all they can do is explain why things can’t be done then, as Nick Carr said, “IT doesn’t matter.”

The second law states that the best way to be agile is to use simple solutions. Agility requires simplicity because you have to reduce the number of things that can go wrong if you want to get stuff done quickly. Otherwise Murphy’s Law bogs down your best laid but complex plans. How many times have you watched or participated as complex projects struggled to overcome one problem after another with no end in sight no matter how hard people worked?

This means practitioners of agile IT learn to size up what at first seem to be complex situations; they get good at understanding what business people need and they find simple ways to deliver the most important capabilities quickly. Then they stay close to the business as situations unfold and keep building on the systems already delivered to provide people with new capabilities in a timely manner.

The third law of agility is the law of diminishing returns; it says doing the same things everybody else is doing is going to yield less and less benefit as time goes on. This law greatly affects where agility can best be used. Doing the same old things in an agile way will not provide nearly as much value as using agility to do brand new things.

This law rewards business people who see new opportunities and it rewards IT people who find new (yet still simple) ways to deliver what business people need to exploit those opportunities. Where other companies and IT groups use complex and expensive technology, the practitioner of agile IT doesn't always follow the crowd and their supposed “best practices”. The practitioner of agile IT isn’t afraid to question conventional wisdom and try different approaches.

So, the next time people question whether your company really needs to be agile ask them how they plan to respond to the law of probability. The next time people downplay your simple IT solutions and propose complex systems instead, ask them how they are going to cope with Murphy’s Law. And when experts tell you their best practices are the way you should be doing things, ask them how that will help you deal with the law of diminishing returns.

[Michael Hugos, principal at Center for Systems Innovation [c4si], delivers seminars and executive briefings and mentors project teams in agile systems development and strategies for business agility. His newest book is Business Agility]

Print

Browse CIO Blogs

See all CIO Blogs »

Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy