An Agile IT is an enabler and catalyst to business agility.
With speed of business change is accelerated, IT shouldn't
expect business to slow down in order to fit its plan, but to be more aggressive,
practical, agile and cautious. What’re strategic perspectives to mange such an Agile
IT?
Agility requires a
set of complementary & strategic IT competencies, including but not
limited to portfolio management, project management, change management,
enterprise architecture, rapid adoption and deployment of new platforms, etc.
It takes strategic guideline - If you have a very good idea of where you are
going - what your systems will be like and how they will work - then it is much
easier to choose quickly between immediate opportunities: pick the ones that
take you in the right direction.As strategy as a vector has both direction and force, the goals
should be clear and therefore the ability to follow a strategy more than
possible.
Agility is being able
to adjust one’s course. Sometimes this may be a huge adjustment. You always
need an overall strategy. A strategy is not too specific that it inhibits
agility. In this day and age, if a company is not agile, it will not exist for
long. Strategy is the direction you're heading, agility comes into play when
you're defining the tactics to get you there. You can have two kinds of stack -
Tactical Stack where all operational measures which are short term are taken
care and strategic stack - where you are having long term objectives so that
business is supported from long term and short term point of views. Marrying
the two together is a challenge but it is not impossible. Both should be part
of strategy fitting a dynamic business climate.
The belief that only
having no strategy will lead to agility is absolutely wrong - this leads
consequently into the situations where the IT is the root cause for
unsuccessful business. The first strategic goal should be to keep your
capability to enable a strategy in case of unforeseen urgent changes in the
business or other fields. This means you have to have well defined, transparent
and "agile" service oriented IT architectures and services.
For achieving
agility, there should be a rolling plan in addition to the mid term or long
term strategic planning document. Need for agility arises due to changes in
underlying assumptions. If these changes are captured in the rolling plan,
flexibility can be achieved. Every CIO may ask self: Is IT responsive and
proactive enough to find answers and solutions in case of emerging chances?
Does IT have a platform which is scalable, secure, resilient and well
interconnected.
IT does not dictate
strategy to business. Any IT strategy cannot exist in isolation to business
strategy. It’s an integral component of business strategy. If the business
dynamics is changing, the IT strategy will need to be revisited and should be
crafted in a manner keeping flexibility. Therefore, IT strategy needs to be
flexible enough to serve the business as needs change. Adjustment to the IT
strategy will be necessary from time to time. Plan accordingly. Business
adjustments may be major, but more likely will not be, making them less
disruptive to a well thought out IT strategy.That said, agile IT takes agile strategy.
The purpose of building an Agile IT is to pursue an optimal way
running IT, to enable business innovation and transformation via taking advantage of organization’s resources, and cultivate a set of necessary and unique set of
business capabilities to gain competitive business advantage.
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