Professional Documents
Culture Documents
What Is Enterprise Agility and Why Is It Important
What Is Enterprise Agility and Why Is It Important
Enterprise agility is growing in popularity due to the quicker pace of change brought by digital disruption, the
COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and new regulations. Agile organizations that have seen success in
development are in the best position to extend these practices across the organization to improve the impact
of agility across more aspects of the business.
Enterprise agility initiatives extend across more diverse teams than traditional agile approaches that focus on
IT-centric roles. A traditional agile team may include developers, testers and operations teams often referred
to as DevOps. Over the years, various experts have expanded this to include business subject matter
experts (BizDevOps), security teams (DevSecOps), data engineers and data scientists (DataOps).
Enterprise agility is the natural extension of core agile concepts across more varied teams that may include
HR, legal, finance, different engineering disciplines and marketing teams.
risk avoidance
In traditional software development, the term Agile with a capital "A" denotes a particular widely recognized
methodology. There is no corresponding agreement on the specific scope and processes of enterprise agility.
Various sources characterize it as ranging from agile for big projects to a way of coordinating agile teams
across the enterprise. However, it seems to be the consensus that enterprise agility involves improving
communication, establishing cross-functional teams and coordinating around actionable metrics.
It should be noted that the process of becoming an agile organization is no easy task and is fraught with
many risks. Many organizations have struggled with adopting agile software development practices. Adopting
an agile operating model across more aspects of the business faces challenges around reorganizing teams,
rallying around actionable metrics and executive support.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/enterprise-agility 1/4
11/14/22, 10:27 AM What is Enterprise Agility and Why is it Important?
Popular agile software frameworks that can be extended to support enterprise agility include the following:
Defining the appropriate metrics for enterprise agility is not as straightforward. Teams need to think about
improving business metrics in concert with improving the processes required to do this better. Value stream
mapping tools can help craft and monitor more nuanced metrics.
Some starting points for specific metrics for tracking enterprise agility efforts include the following:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/enterprise-agility 2/4
11/14/22, 10:27 AM What is Enterprise Agility and Why is it Important?
Key elements that can facilitate an agile transformation across the enterprise include the following:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/enterprise-agility 3/4
11/14/22, 10:27 AM What is Enterprise Agility and Why is it Important?
Barclays bank adopted an enterprise agile approach to align increased output with increased value creation.
This helped the bank identify bottlenecks outside of the traditional development process, such as security
and auditing.
Panera Bread adopted the DAD framework to improve the relationship between IT and the rest of the
business. This accelerated the company's digital sales efforts, simplified mobile ordering and increased
customer satisfaction.
Spark New Zealand, the country's leading telco, adopted agile work processes across the company when it
was lagging innovative startups in 2012. It aligned 40% of employees into smaller cross-functional teams and
gave each employee veto rights. This put the company back on a growth trajectory within the first year.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/definition/enterprise-agility 4/4