Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Maintaining an agile enterprise is not a matter of searching for the strategy
but continuously strategizing, not a matter of specifying an organization
design but committing to a process of organizing, and not generating value
but continuously improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the value gen-
eration process. It is a search for a series of temporary configurations that
create short-term advantages. In turbulent environments, enterprises that
string together a series of temporary but adequate competitive advantages
will outperform enterprises that stick with one advantage for an extended
period of time. The key issue for the built-for-change enterprise is orches-
tration or coordinating the multiple changing subsystems to produce high
levels of current enterprise performance.
22.1.2 Aspects of Agility
This section addresses the analytical side of agility or change proficiency
of the enterprise. It highlights the fundamental principles that underlie an
enterprise's ability to change, and by indicating how to apply these prin-
ciples in real situations, it illustrates what it is that makes a business and any
of its constituting systems easy to change.
Agility or change proficiency enables both efficiency programs (e.g.,
lean production) and transformation programs; if the enterprise is profi-
cient at change, it can adapt to take advantage of an unpredictable oppor-
tunity and can also counter the unpredictable threat. Agility can embrace
semantics across the whole spectrum: it can capture cycle-time reduction,
with everything happening faster; it can build on lean production, with
high resource productivity; it can encompass mass customization, with
customer-responsive product variation; it can embrace virtual enterprise,
with streamlined supplier networks and opportunistic partnerships; it can
echo reengineering, with a process and transformation focus; and it can
demand a learning organization, with systemic training and education.
Being agile means being proficient at change. Agility allows an enterprise to
do anything it wants to do whenever it wants to—or has to—do it. Thus, an
agile enterprise can employ business process reengineering as a core compe-
tency when transformation is called for; it can hasten its conversion to lean
production when greater efficiencies are useful; and it can continue to suc-
ceed when constant innovation becomes the dominant competitive strategy.
Agility can be wielded overtly as a business strategy as well as inherently as
a sustainable-existence competency.
Agility derives from both the physical ability to act (change ability) and
the intellectual ability to find appropriate things to act on (knowledge
management). Agility can be expressed as the ability to manage and apply
knowledge effectively, so that enterprise has the potential to thrive in a
continuously changing and unpredictable business environment. Agility
derives from two sources: an enterprise architecture that enables varia-
tion and an organizational culture that also facilitates required change or
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