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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned that adopting Agile methodologies has been a significant enabler for the technology function to improve the effectiveness of software delivery, thereby positively impacting business outcomes as well. However, scaling the adoption of Agile methodologies across a business is not adequate to enhance the agility of the enterprise.

Agility at the enterprise level has six basic underlying capabilities: responsiveness, versatility, flexibility, resilience, innovativeness, and adaptability, with an underlying capability to sense the environment also needed. It is these capabilities underlying agility which will enable companies to not only survive but also thrive on change.

The next chapter is the first of the three chapters in the foundation section. The chapter explores shifting the enterprise from being a close-ended system to becoming a living system.