Anatomy of Agile Enterprise: Excerpts from the eBook

Anatomy of Agile Enterprise– Excerpts from the eBook

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“Gone are the days of business-as-usual tranquility. The business environment of the 21st century is increasingly complex and characterized by continual change that is unprecedented both in pace and magnitude.”

“The organizational systems and structures must be resilient in the face of unexpected and unpredictable changes and events. They must be agile in readjusting to the constantly shifting value proposition. A more open, organic and dynamic view on organization is called for.”

“Dealing with the increasing complexity requires and results in a sea change in the major aspects of the organization: strategy, structure, technology and governance.“

Agility Imperative

“Global competition and co-operation call for networked business ecosystems that pull together co-specialized capabilities in a nonlinear fashion, eliminating time and distance.”

“In the networked, dynamic markets, organizations no longer have time to defend strategic positions, but competitive advantage needs to be adjusted on a continuous basis.“

Agile Strategy

“The increasing complexity of the business environment must be matched with requisite behaviors to effectively deal with that complexity. These behaviors are enacted in roles with increasing degrees of freedom (i.e. variety at disposal). The roles must be filled by people whose capabilities at least match the complexity of the role.”

“Resorting to alternative organizational arrangements without first giving due consideration to proper structuring of capabilities and managerial accountability will be fundamentally misguided and actually exacerbates the organization’s mismatch with the requisite variety imposed by the environment.“

Agile Organization

“The traditional notion of corporate governance is primarily geared to address the ‘agency problem’: the behavior of self-interested managers is reined in through control and compliance frameworks to protect shareholders’ interests.”

“The functional view of organization inherently results in control-oriented behavior that emphasizes short-term efficiency and conformance. This view is blind to stakeholder considerations beyond the utilitarian logic and fails to recognize the long-term viability of the system and its ecology.“

“In today’s complex and dynamic environments, a clear sense of direction and just-enough coordination is better than a precise plan and tight control. An effective governance model maximizes the decision-making freedom of its participants and allows self-organizing mechanisms to determine what is requisite.”

Agile Governance

The knee-jerk reaction to the increasing cost and pricing pressures may be to focus on the operating costs of IT. However, this “keep the lights on” approach will be seriously misguided, as forced quick fixes render the IT landscape fragile rather than agile.”

“The focus of IT has shifted to more strategic considerations: effective enablement of business change and renewal resilience in the face of incessant transformations.”

“In Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the intricacies of applications and technology infrastructure are encapsulated behind well-defined, self-describing service interfaces that expose the contained information and functionality as reusable, context-independent services. --- This coarse-grained modularity reduces the inherent complexity of the enterprise architecture and improves business agility.”

Agile IT