Features
Feature
Agility enablers
A Gartner fellow explains four keys to enterprise agility.
by David A. Kelly
According to David McCoy, vice president and Gartner fellow, enterprise agility requires four key enablers:
1. Awareness
To be agile you have to be aware of what’s going on. That’s where technologies like business activity monitoring (BAM) come in. “BAM makes you very aware of what’s going on in your organization because it provides real-time insight into operational performance by monitoring events as they occur,” McCoy says. “To respond quickly you have to be agile, and to be agile you have to be aware.”
2. Productivity
Productivity is about being able to respond quickly, once you’re aware of a need. A company might be aware that it’s continually losing sales, but if it can’t constructively respond by changing product or sales models, it’s not agile enough. “Productivity allows businesses to do something productive with their awareness,” McCoy notes.
3. Flexibility
Flexibility may seem like agility, but it refers to having multiple options for dealing with known changes and known opportunities. “If I’m a bank, I might be aware that a customer has missed a mortgage payment and thus want to be productive by taking action. But it’s important to have flexible options for that action—if it’s the first time they’ve missed a payment, maybe we wait until next month. If it’s the third payment they’ve missed, then we need to be much more draconian in our response,” McCoy explains. “Flexibility says you understand your options because you’ve thought about it beforehand and have modeled out different alternatives.”
4. Adaptability
Real agility, though, requires organizations to be ready to handle the unexpected. That’s where adaptability comes in. “Adaptability is an organization’s ability to respond effectively to the unexpected,” McCoy says. Adaptability requires that organizations have the ability to come up with new solutions to unexpected problems on the fly.
David A. Kelly is a Boston-based freelance writer who specializes in business, technology and travel writing.