Today, I ran into the word “agility” on my way to finding something else. We did a lot of work on business agility at Gartner a few years ago – what a great concept!
Agility is an organization’s ability to sense changes and to respond efficiently and effectively to them.
In 2009, if there’s one thing that organizations need, it’s agility. Our economy and the business environment are a steady stream of ups, downs and rapid change; in such an environment, the ability to sense, respond and react are true survival skills!
So, if you’re debating where to focus your innovation efforts, consider organizational agility. It can serve you in the immediate business environment and ready you for change once the economic crisis abates.
Aim to make your organization agile throughout – this means ensuring that people, processes and technology are flexible and adaptable to change. Specifically, in an agile organization:
- People are able to sense change and respond with confidence because they have access to experts, information and analytical tools. These resources enable them to understand threats or opportunities and respond effectively to them. Examples of enablers for human agility are knowledge management and analytics.
- Business processes are designed and built to be flexible and adaptable – in fact, these agility attributes are considered as important as the functional requirements. Thus, when change occurs, business processes can be rapidly and reliably adapted to new requirements. An example enabler of process agility is business process management practices.
- Finally, agile technologies are leveraged for two objectives: enabling key business processes and enabling people to engage in complex human interaction, creativity and decision making. Examples of these enabling technologies are analytics for decision making and social computing for human interaction and creativity.
Organizational agility can also be extended to external people, processes and technology. Agile organizations provide flexible, adaptable systems to enable their customers and partners to collaborate, innovate and decide with confidence.
I consider innovation and agility to be synergistic - when you innovate for agility, more innovation can (and will) follow.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Innovation through the recession | dancingmango // Apr 30, 2009 at 6:22 am
[...] In 2009, if there’s one thing that organizations need, it’s agility. Our economy and the busines… [...]
2 Martyn Wells // Apr 30, 2009 at 6:42 am
I like the emphasis on agility, and agree on it’s importance.
One question I have – can you actually have “agile technologies” ?
Would these need to be technologies that ” sense change and respond efficiently and effectively ” or are these really technologies that enable us humans to “sense change and respond ….” ?
3 Kathy Harris // Apr 30, 2009 at 2:28 pm
To Martyn — thanks for your comment. This is a good philosophical question.
Technology can be built in an agile fashion. Applications, for example, can be built with modular or service-oriented approaches and with logic paths that are controlled by defined rules or events. Such applications can also be executed or orchestrated using workflow or process management technologies. So, I would characterize these as agile technologies that can detect changes in status or content, etc. and adapt their execution path as a result. Still, people build the sensing and adaptive mechanisms into the applications — however, once built, these technologies behave in an agile fashion.
In most cases, however, the role of technology is to provide key information to people and it is people who sense changes and respond through direct actions or technology.
4 Twitter Trackbacks for Innovation and Agility — Two Do’s [gartner.com] on Topsy.com // Aug 25, 2009 at 10:25 pm
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