Time to Consider a Chief Agility Officer

by Jim Highsmith

My last Advisor on leading agility focused on the fact that agility was not reaching far enough into organizations (see "Making Middle Managers Catalysts for Agility," 25 November 2009). To extend the reach, our message to business executives can't be about agile software development, but about responsiveness to customers, responsiveness to competitors, and responsiveness to general economic conditions. Granted, in the last couple of years, executives have often been more concerned with survival than responsiveness. In the future, however, for agility to become a strategic initiative rather than a tactical approach to software development, businesses need to address the questions about responsiveness and its contribution to success.