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

Inhibitors to agility


The following factors related to technology are key barriers for enterprises seeking to enhance and sustain agility.

Treating the technology department as a cost center

Enterprises that are yet to realize the importance of technology in their businesses continue to treat the technology department as a cost center, which is associated with technology being a support function. A cost center's primary goal is to optimize on costs, as the function is viewed as a "necessary evil." The cost-center approach severely limits the capability of the technology function in the following ways:

  • It creates barriers to investing in new technologies. The budget constraints force the function to maintain status quo in times when technology is changing at an exponential rate.

  • It discourages experimentation, as the risk of failure is inherent to experimentation and innovation. A cost center cannot afford to lose money on failures, as the cost incurred on experimentation cannot be justified...