While we have not quite scripted it this way, Cutter Benchmark Review issues seem to have recently coalesced around some major themes. One is innovation and the role of IT in fostering/enabling it, another one is talent development and staffing -- with the looming crisis of talent being the catalyst of our interest. This month's issue also fits within a larger theme that we have been exploring recently: agility. Avid readers of CBR will remember our July 2007 issue on agile software development ("Making Agility Stick: What's Working, What's Not ," Vol. 7, No. 7), as well as our November 2007 issue on dynamic and improvisational IT capabilities ("Dynamic IT Capabilities: Becoming Nimble Through IT Agility ," Vol. 7, No. 11). The July 2007 installment of CBR was of course quite pragmatic and focused on the systems development process.
Our concern in that issue was helping readers who had embraced the agile philosophy make sure the approach would stick in their organization. To the contrary, the November 2007 issue was one of the most theoretical issues of CBR to date. In that installment, we reported on the research literature focusing on how to mobilize and deploy IT-based resources in combination with other resources and capabilities so as to better compete in increasingly turbulent environments.
This current issue strikes a balance between these two approaches and focuses at the midlevel between the trenches -- where software development takes place -- and the executive suite -- where strategy design takes place. It focuses on the management of the agile enterprise and on understanding how organizations can facilitate and foster agile practices through investments in IT infrastructure and technology practices. As such, the survey our contributors crafted tackles issues of strategy, relative positioning and competition, as well as technology infrastructure, software development methodologies, and IT architecture. This issue is the glue that connects the previous two and completes our trilogy on agility.
To state that agility is critical in today's increasingly turbulent environment is almost a tautology. But for as widely accepted as this notion is, creating and managing an agile enterprise remains an elusive and difficult task. I was reminded of this difficulty in my most recent case study on Hilton Hotels Corporation.
Hilton is a behemoth of an organization with more than 3,000 hotels in more than 70 countries and managing nine brands in every segment of the hospitality industry. Not content with this, it is set to open a new property every two days for several years in the future. Its complexity and diversity notwithstanding, Hilton runs off of a standard enterprise infrastructure built on best-of-breed applications collectively named OnQ -- as in "we are ready to serve guests on cue." But serving guests "on cue" inherently requires the ability to be flexible and responsive in your interactions with them: every guest is unique, so every interaction needs to be unique. How do you structure an organization that at the same time is able to deliver a consistent level of service -- the critical success factor for any global brand -- and yet serve individual guest needs? You do it by tackling both aspects of your information systems: the technical and the social. You ensure that your system architectures have inherent flexibility from both a design and a use standpoint. You then develop a culture of improvisational capability within the boundaries of brand-defined service levels -- clearly not an easy task!
Without digressing too much, it is clear that an issue of CBR on enterprise agility was needed and would prove very valuable. We therefore recruited a team of experts on this subject and issued a survey to benchmark the state-of-the-art amongst our readers. Our academic perspective is provided by Alan MacCormack, associate professor in the Technology & Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School and member of Cutter's Innovation & Enterprise Agility team. Alan's work has traditionally focused on the management of technology and product development in rapidly changing environments, such as the Internet software industry and the computer workstation and server industry. Alan's previous work and current interests make him uniquely suited to bring a new perspective to the notion of enterprise agility. Our view from the field comes from Lou Mazzucchelli and Tim Lister, both Fellows of the Cutter Business Technology Council.
Alan starts us off by making an important point: "The search for agility requires a consistent pattern of decisions to be made across different areas of the firm over time, emphasizing flexibility over efficiency and responsiveness over control." He then provides a definition of IT agility and dives into the survey data, identifying patterns and surfacing important relationships. He discusses the patterns emerging in firms that seek to become agile, those that achieve agility, how they do it, and the systems architectures and infrastructure decisions that seem to foster success.
Lou and Tim take a much narrower focus to the survey and mostly look at IT agility. They immediately tackle the survey data with their characteristically colorful writing style. They first challenge some fundamental notions about IT agility, then they attempt to understand the differences amongst respondents addressing both the organization as a whole as well as the departmental and divisional levels.
Agility remains one of the most discussed and difficult challenges for both strategic and IT management. We at CBR have been looking at agility from a technology and strategy perspective. With this issue, we bring it all together and focus on the management of agility. With environmental turbulence continuing to increase, agility will become more important and, most likely, harder to achieve. As you continue the quest, I hope you will agree that, taken together, our three installments of CBR on agility provide some very useful guidance.
