terprise applications are often not able to meet, according to a September 2006 Forrester Stretching Those Research Inc. survey of 75 business and IT decision-makers. Given these business needs, in a September 2007 report Organizational Muscles titled, “The Dynamic Business Applications Imperative,” Forrester recommends that the primary goal of IT organizations over the next five years “should be to invent a new generation of enterprise software that adapts to the business and its work, and evolve with it.”
There’s no shortage of current and emerging technologies that can help organizations achieve this goal. They include business intelligence (BI) software, which analyzes large amounts of information to uncover trends, problems or opportunities; groupware and workflow software, which makes it easier for individuals to collaborate; and business process management (BPM) software, which helps organizations understand and improve complex workflows.
Technologies such as service-
When a national retail giant tailors the product mix and even the look and feel of individual stores to the needs of neighborhood customers, that’s agility. When nontechnical users can deploy and tweak product promotions on the corporate Web site without help from IT, that’s agility. When a consumer goods manufacturer changes product design on the fly as it gets feedback from customers, that’s agility.
Businesses have always had to respond quickly to change. But global competition, changing regulations and the ease with which ideas and business models spread over the Internet make it more vital than ever that companies adapt to change quickly. There are also more tools than ever before to help companies become agile, ranging from business intelligence software that detects problems and trends to
service-oriented architectures, which gather information from widely scattered systems in new ways.
But the move to agile organizations is still in its early stages, with companies still exploring how best to use the technology as well as how to organize and motivate the skilled professionals needed to keep them agile over time.
oriented architecture can make information sharing easier by making data available as a “ service” rather than requiring the expensive and time-consuming process of writing point-to-point interfaces among the applications. Agile development methods can reduce the time and effort required to deliver new applications to users while also (hopefully) ensuring those applications meet the needs of the business.
Becoming agile also requires changes in culture and business processes. Executive sponsorship is critical to force sometimes-competing business units to work together and to share information in ways they normally wouldn’t. Agile software development methodologies require business managers to commit more time and effort to software development than they might normally.
For a large, complex organization agility means more than merely responding quickly to change. It requires quickly and accurately detecting changes in the business environment, creating appropriate responses to those changes, communicating and implementing the new strategies across the organization, and then monitoring and modifying those strategies as needed over time.
Achieving all this requires sharing information among multiple applications that may not have been designed to work together, creating new workflows that cross boundaries within the business or among business partners, and monitoring the results of the changed business processes. But it is just such requirements that en-
agility pays While going agile may be challenging, it is not impossible. Organizations ranging from state governments to “big box”
it’s too Hard to change
Considering your existing enterprise application implementations, how
important are the following business problem?
(Percent answering “important” or “very important”)
inflexibility limits process changes 77%
Lack of visibility into process results 77%
Poor cross-functional processes 76%
Business requirements vs. application mismatch 76%
Poor internal/external collaboration tools 65%
can’t extend processes to external partners 53%
Poor industry-specific functionality 47%
Base: 75 business and I T decision-makers Sour CE: ForrESTEr r ESEar Ch InC., 2006
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