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