Business Agility and IT Agility

Business Agility and Information Technology Diffusion

This book addresses issues related to business agility and the diffusion of Information Technology (IT). Success, even survival, in today's business environment has been made complex and difficult by technologically-based competitive pressure. One promising strategy is to be agile and ready to adapt quickly to changes in the environment or market. Such strategy takes shape as an agile software development, agile manufacturing, agile modeling and agile iterations. In contrast, successful IT diffusion is known to be a process that takes time and careful effort. Many IT projects that succeeded in developing a product have subsequently failed in changing the behavior of the target group when diffusion just didn't happen. Therefore this volume responds to the question: What is the relationship between agility and IT diffusion?

The book's scope covers information systems and technology issues, as well as organizational and managerial issues, related to agility and IT diffusion. The planned perspectives include topics such as diffusion of agile methods, enabling business agility with IT, creating agile environments that facilitate diffusion of IT, theories and frameworks for understanding diffusion and agility issues, best practices relating to business agility and IT diffusion, software process improvement and agility, diffusion studies of specific agile technologies, and impacts of diffusion of IT agile methods.

This book contains a chapter on Assessing business agility: A Multi-Industry Study in The Netherlands (Van Oosterhout et al)

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Response Ability: the language, structure and Culture of the Agile enterprise

This book addresses the practical and physical aspects of how to become agile, and does not spend any real effort on the why question, or on the question of what to do with it once you have this response ability. Plenty of others are dealing with these unaddressed questions, while no-one as yet has addressed the how part. My observation is that people don't perceive a problem in any tangible, actionable form until they appreciate that a solution exists – and then they begin to define and understand the problem in terms of the solution.

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Agile Information Systems: Conceptualization, Construction and Management

This book presents cutting-edge research and thinking on agile information systems. The concept of agile information systems has gained strength over the last 3 years, coming into the MIS world from manufacturing, where agile manufacturing systems has been an important concept for several years now. The idea of agility is powerful: with competition so fierce today and the speed of business so fast, a companys ability to move with their customers and support constant changing business needs is more important than ever. Agile information systems:
- have the ability to add, remove, modify, or extend functionalities with minimal penalties in terms of time, cost, and effort
- have the ability to process information in a flexible manner
- have the ability to accommodate and adjust to the changing needs of the end-users.
This is the first book to bring together academic experts, researchers, and practitioners to discuss how companies can create and deploy agile information systems. Contributors are well-regarded academics known to be on the cutting-edge of their fields.
The Editor, Kevin Desouza, has organized the chapters under three categories:
1) discussion of the concept of agile information systems (i.e. defining agile information management, its attributes, antecedents, consequences, etc.)
2) discussion of information systems within the context of agility (i.e., descriptions of agile information systems and their attributes, how to build agile information systems, etc.)
3) discussion of organizational management issues in the context of agile information systems (i.e., how to prepare the organization for agile information systems, management of agile information systems for improved organizational performance, etc.)

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Business Agility Requirements in Financial Services: implications for IT Architectures

Several recent high-impact trends appear to have hit the financial services organizations by surprise. To cope with largely unpredictable changes effectively. Financial Services organizations need to be able to easily and swiftly adapt their processes and IT systems, in other words, FSO’s need to be agile. This study empirically assesses the level of agility and agility gaps of financial services companies. A comparison is made with other sectors. Based on qualitative data, agility gaps are translated into IT architecture requirements.

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Change factors requiring agility and implications for IT

The current highly dynamic business environment requires businesses to be agile. Business agility is the ability to swiftly and easily change businesses and business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage unpredictable external and internal changes. This study reports on a cross-industry analysis of change factors requiring agility and assesses agility gaps that companies are facing in four industry sectors in the Netherlands. A framework was constructed to measure the perceived gaps between the current level of business agility and the required level of business agility. The questionnaire and in-depth interviews held reveal that today's businesses perceive to lack the agility required to quickly respond to changes, whose speed and requirements are difficult to predict. The paper presents rankings of generic and sector-specific agility gaps. These show that although some generic change factors requiring agility exist, the change factors requiring agility that cause agility gaps differ across industry sectors. Among the factors that enable or hinder business agility, the existence of inflexible legacy systems is perceived to be a very important disabler in achieving more business agility. A number of basic principles and directions are discussed to transform Information Technology from barrier into key enabler for increased agility in organizations and business networks

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