Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By : Sunil Mundra
Book Image

Enterprise Agility

By: Sunil Mundra

Overview of this book

The biggest challenge enterprises face today is dealing with fast-paced change in all spheres of business. Enterprise Agility shows how an enterprise can address this challenge head on and thrive in the dynamic environment. Avoiding the mechanistic construction of existing enterprises that focus on predictability and certainty, Enterprise Agility delivers practical advice for responding and adapting to the scale and accelerating pace of disruptive change in the business environment. Agility is a fundamental shift in thinking about how enterprises work to effectively deal with disruptive changes in the business environment. The core belief underlying agility is that enterprises are open and living systems. These living systems, also known as complex adaptive systems (CAS), are ideally suited to deal with change very effectively. Agility is to enterprises what health is to humans. There are some foundational principles that can be broadly applied, but the definition of healthy is very specific to each individual. Enterprise Agility takes a similar approach with regard to agility: it suggests foundational practices to improve the overall health of the body—culture, mindset, and leadership—and the health of its various organs: people, process, governance, structure, technology, and customers. The book also suggests a practical framework to create a plan to enhance agility.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Enterprise Agility
About Packt
Forewords
Endorsements
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Significance


Almost all enterprises do at least some outsourcing of information technology (IT) work. American research firm Gartner defines IT outsourcing as "the use of external service providers to effectively deliver IT-enabled business process, application service and infrastructure solutions for business outcomes." [i]

Outsourcing ranges from working with a single provider, to having an ecosystem of providers. It is not uncommon to find the number of providers to be in three digits. For example, a large bank in India has 300 different companies for its IT solutions and services providers, and an internal team of over 100 people to manage these providers.

The primary drivers for outsourcing include the following:

  • Access to specialized capabilities

  • Cost reduction

  • Augmenting IT capacity

  • Focusing on core competencies

  • Reducing risk

While these benefits are important for every company, collaborating with a technology partner has its own set of challenges, given that the partner is a different enterprise...