Mobile Applications - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 468

a product technology, or an individual's competency. This is essen-
tial for ensuring innovation management to sustain leadership.

The ability to be intelligence intensive involves the following aspects:

a. Enterprise knowledge management

b. Enterprise collaborative learning

When confronted with a competitive opportunity, a smaller
company is able to act more quickly, whereas a larger company
has access to more comprehensive knowledge (options,
resources, etc.) and can decide to act sooner and more
thoroughly.

Agility is the ability to respond to (and ideally benefit from) unexpected
change. Agility is unplanned and unscheduled adaption to unforeseen
and unexpected external circumstances. However, we must differentiate
between agility and flexibility. Flexibility is scheduled or planned adapta-
tion to unforeseen yet expected external circumstances.
One of the foremost abilities of an agile enterprise is its ability to quickly
react to change and adapt to new opportunities. This ability to change works
along two dimensions:

1. The number or types of change an organization is able to undergo

2. The degree of change an organization is able to undergo

The former is termed as range, and the latter is termed as response abil-
ity. The more response able an enterprise is, the more radical a change it
can gracefully address. Range refers to how large a domain is covered by
the agile response system; in other words, how far from the expected set of
events one can go and still have the system respond well. However, given
a specific range, how well the system responds is a measure of response or
change ability.

Enterprises primarily aim progressively for efficiency, flexi-
bility, and innovation in that order. The Model Builder's kit,
Erector Set kit, and LEGO kit are illustrations of enterprises
targeting for efficiency, flexibility, and innovation (i.e., agility),
respectively.

Construction toys offer a useful metaphor because the enterprise systems
we are concerned with must be configured and reconfigured constantly,
precisely the objective of most construction toys. An enterprise system