IMPROVING ISD AGILITY IN FAST-MOVING SOFTWARE ORGANIZATIONS

Fast-moving software organizations must respond quickly to changing technological options and mar-ket trends while delivering high-quality services at competitive prices. Improving agility of infor-mation systems development (ISD) may reconcile these inherent tensions, but previous research of agility predominantly focused separately on managing either the individual project or the organiza-tion. Limited research has investigated the management that ties the agility of individual projects with the company agility characterizing fast-moving organizations. This paper reports an action research study on how to improve ISD agility in a fast-moving software organization. The study maps central problems in the ISD management to direct improvements of agility. Our following intervention ad-dressed method improvements in defining types of ISD by customer relations and integrating the method with the task management tool used by the organization. The paper discusses how the action research contributes to our understanding of ISD agility in fast-moving software organizations with a framework for mapping and evaluating improvements of agility. The action research specifically points out that project managers need to attend to the company’s agility in relating to customers, that company agility links to project agility, and that this requires light method and tool support

How Agile is Agile Enough? Towards A Theory of Agility in Software Development

One poorly investigated issue in organizational agility is the question how organizations change their speed while adopting and exploiting new IT capability. In this paper we outline a theory of software development agility that draws upon a model of IT innovations by Swanson and on March’s learning theory and in particular on his concepts of exploration and exploitation. We explore how both exploration and exploitation as organizational learning modes can software development agility. We propose a sequential model of organizational learning in which agility is driven by different factors during different stages – exploration vs. exploitation- of organizational learning. We show that software development agility is influenced by the external demands, the diffusion level and rate of the IT innovation, its radicalness, and the organizations’ needs to balance multiple conflicting process goals including speed, quality, cost, risk and innovative content. We illustrate the value of the model by exploring how seven software organizations controlled the demands for increased agility i.e. their development speed or over a period of five years (1999-2004), and how they balanced the need for the increased agility with other critical development criteria like cost, risk, quality and innovative content. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings for future research on agility and related management practices

Digital Agility: Conceptualizing Agility for the Digital Era

It goes without saying that digital technologies have been forming an increasingly crucial component of companies’ value offerings in recent times. In many industries, this trend has led to converging markets, where traditional firms compete and collaborate with software firms and digital startups. One central competitive factor in these markets is the ability to capitalize on digital options faster than the competition. Prior research on agility in this context has advanced our knowledge on managerial and employee behaviors, as well as structures supporting such behaviors, to enable agility both in traditional and software firms. The challenge for firms in digitally converging markets is that agility now requires a combination of organizational and IS development agility—perceiving these concepts as separate entities is no longer appropriate or instructive. Building on prior work on agile behaviors and structures, and published cases on digital firms, we develop an integrative conception of digital agility in line with the realities of the digital era

Enterprise architecture as enabler of organizational agility : a municipality case study

Organizational agility is one of the top management concerns as organizations face today increasingly changing environments. Among enterprise architecture (EA) benefits, organizational agility has been claimed as one of them, perceived as a direct or indirect benefit, for example, through business-IT alignment, another top management concern. However, even with reasonable explanations in the EA literature, there is still a lack of empirical evidence to support such claim. Our research looks for that evidence seeking to understand how the development and use of EA may contribute for organizational agility. Having one of the biggest municipalities in the country as the research setting, using a mix-methods approach, a case study was carried out to identify EA artefacts, understand EA at use and examine agility in a specific change situation. In this case, enterprise architecture was not just used but was developed and improved during the change situation to enable organizational agility.PEst-OE/EEI/UI0319/201

Minimum Viable Common Ground: A Case Study of Collaboration Rooms as an Agile Approach to Interdepency Management

Large-scale agile transformation implies that agile approaches are moving from standalone in-formation system development units such as teams towards being applied in more complex organi-sational settings with multiple and diverse units. Research on large-scale agile transformation suggests that agile methods with its focus on mutual adjustment increases interdependencies be-tween diverse units. However, extant empirical research on how interdependencies can be man-aged in large-scale agile transformations is scarce. We report from an interpretative case study of an agile transformation initiative in a company with 20.000 employees. Based on data from 32 interviews combined with participatory observation in retrospectives we analyse how “collabora-tion rooms” are used to manage the interdependence between heterogeneous units, and how the collaboration rooms are conceived by information systems development practitioners as an agile transformation initiative. Using the concept of trading zones we contribute by discussing how het-erogeneous units can manage interdependencies by using collaboration rooms as a minimum via-ble common ground. We discuss how the minimum viable ground i) fit new practices with existing practices, ii) allows flatter decision structures, and iii) is a subtle and iterative approach to organ-izational transformation

Minimum Viable Common Ground: A Case Study of Collaboration Rooms as an Agile Approach to Interdepency Management

Large-scale agile transformation implies that agile approaches are moving from standalone in-formation system development units such as teams towards being applied in more complex organi-sational settings with multiple and diverse units. Research on large-scale agile transformation suggests that agile methods with its focus on mutual adjustment increases interdependencies be-tween diverse units. However, extant empirical research on how interdependencies can be man-aged in large-scale agile transformations is scarce. We report from an interpretative case study of an agile transformation initiative in a company with 20.000 employees. Based on data from 32 interviews combined with participatory observation in retrospectives we analyse how “collabora-tion rooms” are used to manage the interdependence between heterogeneous units, and how the collaboration rooms are conceived by information systems development practitioners as an agile transformation initiative. Using the concept of trading zones we contribute by discussing how het-erogeneous units can manage interdependencies by using collaboration rooms as a minimum via-ble common ground. We discuss how the minimum viable ground i) fit new practices with existing practices, ii) allows flatter decision structures, and iii) is a subtle and iterative approach to organ-izational transformation.acceptedVersio

Mindfulness and agile software development

The field of information systems development (ISD) is still not well understood and suffers from a lack of sustainable theories which are firmly based on research of ISD practice. This is also true for agile software development (ASD). In this paper, we develop a framework based on the theory of mindfulness and map the main characteristics of mindfulness to the most prominent features of ASD. By applying the framework to a case study of ASD practice we demonstrate the relationship between the theory of mindfulness and ASD, and show the usefulness of our framework as a contribution to theorizing about ASD and to a better understanding of ASD in practice

Agile Security for Information Warfare: A Call for Research

The context of information security is changing dramatically. Networking technologies have driven the global expansion of electronic commerce. Electronic commerce is increasingly engaging sophisticated advances like digital agents and web services. As a result of such advances, the information systems architectures that must be secured are becoming dynamic: shifting landscapes of changing vulnerabilities. At the same time, the threats in these landscapes are also becoming more sophisticated and dynamic. Information warfare is raising the stakes in information security by leveling intensive and highly novel threats against civilian systems. Information security researchers need to develop organizational approaches and methodologies that respond to this new context. The conflation of information warfare and short cycle development theories promises new information security practices. These approaches and methodologies would effectively lead to agile information security development. Agile information security development anticipates threats and rapidly deploys necessary safeguards in the context of shifting systems landscapes amid pervasive systems threats