Agility — like innovation, productivity and cost-savings — is a must-have at businesses today. If you’re not agile, you’ll succumb to the competition. End of story.         

But achieving agility is an ongoing story, and tactics vary company to company and task to task. Although I dislike the overused word “enabler,” IT definitely enables business agility and even has a starring role to play. At the same time, agility itself enables a business to reach its end goals — faster transactions, better productivity and lower costs. Agility results when business operates more efficiently, and therefore, there is no single solution — whether it’s cloud or virtualization or consumer devices — to attain it in an instant. Agility doesn’t come in a box or over the Web; it’s a combination of approaches measured in many ways.

Many business experts offer theories and examples of how to become an agile business. Mark W.S. Chun, Director of the  Center for Applied Research  and Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Graziadio School of Business and Management at  Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, told me recently that his latest research indicates that, contrary to many beliefs, public-sector IT efforts — particularly in Asia — are often more innovative and agile than those in the private-sector. While lower funding and transient management teams are usually business inhibitors, Chun says that when you’re small and scrappy, you take risks and adopt new ideas quickly — before the next administration, budget cuts or political shift occurs. That may be why mobile technologies and cloud services are being widely embraced by governments and their agencies, he says.

Smart Enterprise magazine will be examining “IT at the Speed of Business” in the latest issue. It includes a profile of Josh Morton, Sprint’s VP of IT Enterprise Services, who must empower its dispersed enterprise to respond faster and with greater agility than ever before. A major re-platforming of the IT infrastructure and a new mobile strategy are under way to meet demands.

At Avis Europe, reexamination of its business processes was a first step toward making effective use of resources and reducing costs to become more agile. Avis deployed CA Clarity™ Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) to manage risk and for visibility of IT service and resource costs.

In the best cases, agility is simply a way of doing business — and it starts at the top level of the organization. In this interview in the MIT Sloan Review, Christian Rynning-Tønnesen, CEO of Statkraft, says: “The ability to create strategies and adapt to changing conditions quickly is critical for maintaining a competitive edge.” Rather than slowing down the company with regulations, costs and overhead, Statkraft is pursuing sustainability to keep it ahead of competitors and its marketplace. “In just two decades Statkraft has grown from a state-owned, Norwegian-focused power supplier to one of the world’s largest renewable power producers,” according to the article.

Look for more articles and blogs about IT-driven agility — including outsourcing trends and the role of Enterprise Architects in making businesses more nimble — in the coming month on Smart Enterprise Exchange. Then let us know some of the ways your IT department is moving rapidly to meet business needs.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

As a business-technology journalist and editor, I am fortunate to meet many great thinkers. While I am still cynical enough to believe that no one has all of the answers, nor does anyone have a crystal ball to see into the future, I do recognize fresh thinking when I hear and see it.

That’s why I’m very pleased this month that Smart Enterprise Exchange is featuring some of the very best global thought leaders in the areas of IT, cloud computing and business organization.

Since knowledge is empirical — ideas are built on earlier ideas — it’s appropriate that we offer an Insights column by John Seely Brown, a long-time industry innovator, lecturer and author. JSB, as he’s known, cut his teeth at Xerox’s PARC labs and is still analyzing major tech trends — these days at Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. His most recent book is The Power of Pull: How small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion (Basic Books, April 2010).

His article, Unlocking Enterprise Agility, delves into the tough issues surrounding service orientation, “loosely coupled process networks” and “elastic architectures” and whether they can support existing applications and platforms. He believes they can interact with existing platforms, but not without new policies, retooling and scalable solutions. You can read more from him in the October issue of Smart Enterprise magazine, too.

Another sage leader to join our community is Timothy Chou. I don’t use the word “visionary” often nor do I use it casually, but in Tim’s case, it’s very appropriate. Tim has advocated for cloud computing before the term existed. Among his long and impressive resume it’s notable that as head of Oracle’s On Demand computing operations — then the fastest-growing business at Oracle — he was promoting SaaS models at a time when software licenses and computer architectures were solidly entrenched in global corporations. His viewpoint was strengthened in his groundbreaking book, The End of Software (Sams, 2004), as well as his entrepreneurial ventures at Openwater Networks and elsewhere.

In September, Tim was a keynote speaker at our event in Newport, R.I., and soon, the larger community will have the chance to interact with Tim in an upcoming live videocast on November 11. Look for more details and registration information on the site.

Also on our roster this month is a blog and video from another insightful IT advisor, lecturer and author. Peter Hinssen is bringing his fresh insights to global audiences in Asia, Europe and the U.S. Peter’s very serious ideas about the creative thinking that’s needed in the digital world — The New Normal (Uitgeverij Lannoo, 2010), as his just-released book is titled — are presented in a lighthearted fashion that makes the work seem easy and doable. In fact, Peter recommends radically new organizational models — including revamped IT operations and a changed role for the CIO — to bring enterprises into the consumer-led digital world.

All of these Big Thinkers have outlasted others because they get it right. I hope you will use these latest articles and blogs as you formulate new strategies and tactics for your digital business. And please join your peers for our videocast with Tim Chou and two other cloud computing experts on November 11.

Paula Klein
Editor and Community Manager
Smart Enterprise Exchange