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 the new year begins, we’re all looking for reasons to celebrate. Although there are some positive signs, with business outlooks still uncertain, I tend to take a cautious approach toward many predictions I read.

Yet I was drawn to the findings of a recent Accenture study— based on feedback from 550 global, senior executives — which concluded that 72 percent of business and IT executives place greater value on the IT function today than they did before the economic crisis. What's more, these executives view IT as an important part of their economic recovery efforts. The study, conducted jointly with the Economist Intelligence Unit, shows that not only are businesses willing to spend more on IT, it is viewed as a tool to gain competitive advantage.

In particular, one area that clearly seems to be gaining traction is virtualization. “By far the most pressing priorities of IT chiefs are for server virtualization and consolidation (44 percent),” according to the report.

At Smart Enterprise Exchange, we view virtualization as a key strategy going into the new year and new decade, too. This month we cover the topic in all three of our topic tracks: from the Business Technology Strategy, Business Technology Execution and Professional Development perspectives. Our emphasis reflects the fact that virtual machines are moving out of pilot programs into production environments. Early adopters can now offer best practices — particularly about their server and storage consolidation efforts. And virtual desktops are a nascent sector with tremendous growth opportunities. Many CIOs are recognizing that virtualization efforts will have a greater impact on the enterprise than they first realized.

We asked Roy Illsley, a veteran industry consultant and Ovum’s Senior Analyst in the U.K., for his perspective on virtualization implementation. In his Smart Insights column, Illsley drills down to some of the tactical issues CIOs are confronting. He says that “development of new capabilities for infrastructure virtualization will continue to unfold rapidly this year,” although three key factors — proprietary technologies, security and questions arising about cloud computing options — must be addressed.

In our Smart Practices article this month, Brad Manning, CIO at Quaker Chemical Corp., views virtualization as more than a tactical maneuver to reduce expenses: “It should be part of a longer-term strategic plan and architectural road map that is aligned to business strategies.”

Manning adds: “Your roles and organizational design will need to change. IT processes will need to be revisited, including change management, backups and disaster recovery.” To help in this aspect of virtualization, Smart Resources offers reports and events to help you assess your own career as well as your staffing needs.

All of the efforts seem to be worthwhile. Ovum’s Illsley notes that virtualization may be the linchpin to gradually transform the role and responsibility of the IT department into “true business technology leaders.” And based on Accenture’s findings, Keith Haviland, its Global Managing Director for Systems Integration Consulting, is quoted as saying: “While other operational budgets are being slashed, global firms look toward IT as a way to rebuild strength.”

Now that’s something to celebrate.

Let us know about your virtualization experiences and begin a discussion with your peers in our virtualization community group.

Paula Klein
Editor and Community Manager
Smart Enterprise Exchange