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

COTS products for core capabilities


An enterprise whose business-critical processes and operations are driven by commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) [viii] solutions runs the risk of these solutions becoming impediments to enhancing agility. There are several factors that can lead to this negative outcome. If the COTS solution is a few years old, it is likely to have the same issues as legacy software, which impede agility.

Moreover, by definition, these solutions are standard solutions and hence they are unlikely to be fully aligned to the enterprise's processes. Quite often, there are limitations to the extent that these solutions can be customized for the unique context of the enterprise. This often results in the company having to modify its processes, and sometimes even critical ones, in order to "fit" with the solution. As the license of the COTS is owned by the technology partner, the enterprise is forced to depend on the partner for customizing and enhancing the solution. Due to this...