Implementing and Sustaining the Agile Enterprise
Forward-looking organizations seek agility so that they can adapt quickly, efficiently, and appropriately to changes in their environment or business strategy. And to be agile, a business must also be seamless. Organizations that will thrive in the future will be those that create a seamless enterprise from one end of their value chain to the other. IT solutions have traditionally been built, purchased, or acquired in isolated silos, an approach that frequently resulted in a brittle, inflexible portfolio of hardware and applications. To effectively support the business, IT must develop into a more responsive, agile enterprise environment.
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and associated methods of business process management (BPM) and master data management (MDM) have been described by some as the solution to every information technology woe. But the simple fact is, in today’s real-world business environment, organizations can benefit most by working diligently to transform themselves into more agile, responsive and productive enterprises.
Organizations can’t succeed if they adopt every faddish process. Nor should they expect to improve their companies by buying into every new product idea. Instead, by adhering to the principles of the agile enterprise, organizations can leverage IT to empower themselves, to control and drive out cost, and to be more competitive. By adopting the principles of the agile enterprise, organizations can assess technologies and processes and then apply them in logical and incremental steps toward their true business goals—all the while reducing their risk, extracting value from their IT systems and lowering their total cost of ownership.
