Enterprise Agility: Why Is Transformation so Hard?

Enterprise agility requires capabilities to transform, sense and seize new business opportunities more quickly than competitors. However, acquiring those capabilities, such as continuous delivery and scaling agility to product programmes, portfolios and business models, is challenging in many organisations. This paper introduces definitions of enterprise agility involving business management and cultural lenses for analysing large-scale agile transformation. The case organisation, in the higher education domain, leverages collaborative discovery sprints and an experimental programme to enable a bottom-up approach to transformation. Meanwhile the prevalence of bureaucracy and organisational silos are often contradictory to agile principles and values. The case study results identify transformation challenges based on observations from a five-month research period. Initial findings indicate that increased focus on organisational culture and leveraging of both bottom-up innovation and supportive top-down leadership activities, could enhance the likelihood of a successful transformation

An Approach to Transform Public Administration into SOA-based Organizations

Nowadays, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is widely spread in private organizations. However, when transferring this knowledge to Public Administration, it is realized that it has not been transformed in terms of its legal nature into organizations capable to operate under the SOA paradigm. This fact prevents public administration bodies from offering the efficient services they have been provided by different boards of governments. A high-level framework to perform this transformation is proposed. Taking it as starting point, an instance of a SOA Target Meta-Model can be obtained by means of an iterative and incremental process based on the analysis of imperatives and focused on the particular business context of each local public administration. This paper briefly presents a practical experience consisting in applying this process to a Spanish regional public administration.Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

The agile strategies in IT Governance: Towards a framework of agile IT Governance in the banking industry

Digital transformation has changed corporate reality and, with that, firms’ IT environments and IT governance (ITG). As such, the perspective of ITG has shifted from the design of a relatively stable, closed and controllable system of a self-sufficient enterprise to a relatively fluid, open, agile and transformational system of networked co-adaptive entities. Related to this paradigm shift in ITG, this paper aims to clarify how the concept of an effective ITG framework has changed in terms of the demand for agility in organizations. Thus, this study conducted 33 qualitative interviews with executives and senior managers from the banking industry in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Analysis of the interviews focused on the formation of categories and the assignment of individual text parts (codings) to these categories to allow for a quantitative evaluation of the codings per category. Regarding traditional and agile ITG dimensions, 22 traditional and 25 agile dimensions in terms of structures, processes and relational mechanisms were identified. Moreover, agile strategies within the agile ITG construct and ten ITG patterns were identified from the interview data. The data show relevant perspectives on the implementation of traditional and new ITG dimensions and highlight ambidextrous aspects in ITG in the German-speaking banking industry

Semantic Web Technologies in Support of Service Oriented Architecture Governance

As Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments gradually mature they also grow in size and complexity. The number of service providers, services, and service consumers increases, and so do the dependencies among these entities and the various artefacts that describe how services operate, or how they are meant to operate under specific conditions. Appropriate governance over the various phases and activities associated with the service lifecycle is therefore indispensable in order to prevent a SOA deployment from dissolving into an unmanageable infrastructure. The employment of Semantic Web technologies for describing and reasoning about service properties and governance requirements has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of SOA Governance solutions by increasing the levels of automation in a wide-range of tasks relating to service lifecycle management. The goal of the proposed research work is to investigate the application of Semantic Web technologies in the context of service lifecycle management, and propose a concrete theoretical and technological approach for supporting SOA Governance through the realisation of semantically-enhanced registry and repository solutions

AGILE PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: DESIGN GOALS AND PRINCIPLES

Digital transformation and the resulting volatile and unpredictable business environments challenge traditional enterprises to continuously fulfill and surpass customers’ expectations. They need to become agile in its organization by proactively sensing the unpredictable change and responding accordingly with speed and dexterity. While many organizations are quite advanced in realizing adaptivity at the operational level, strategic agility in general and in portfolio management in particular as linking op-erations and strategy for satisfying the customer needs is in its nascence. To identify the baseline for portfolio management for achieving agility, we derive four design goals for an effective agile portfolio management system, six design principles on how to achieve these goals and show an exemplary setup with design features. Our results are based on a research study with empirical insights from six com-panies and theoretical input from thirteen existing case studies and eight frameworks for scaling agility to the portfolio level. By deriving design principles for an agile portfolio management system, our work closes a gap in existing research, which focuses on principles for adaptive IT portfolio management processes instead of proactive enterprise systems, insights on individual portfolio practices or non-generalizable blueprints for an agile organizational setup without showing alternative approaches

The Concept of Agility in IT Governance and its Impact on Firm Performance

With significant advancements in digital technologies, firms find themselves competing in an increasingly dynamic business environment. Therefore, the logic of business decisions is based on the agility to respond to emerging trends in a proactive way. By contrast, traditional IT governance (ITG) frameworks rely on hierarchy and standardized mechanisms to ensure better business/IT alignment. This conflict leads to a call for an ambidextrous governance, in which firms alternate between stability and agility in their ITG mechanisms. Accordingly, this research aims to explore how agility might be integrated in ITG. A quantitative research strategy is implemented to explore the impact of agility on the causal relationship among ITG, business/IT alignment, and firm performance. The results show that the integration of agile ITG mechanisms contributes significantly to the explanation of business/IT alignment. As such, firms need to develop a dual governance model powered by traditional and agile ITG mechanisms

Scaling Agility in Incumbent Firms: A Literature Review

Scaling agility as a process of applying agile concepts to more extensive parts of the organization promises incumbent firms to achieve the same benefits as their digital competitors. However, copying digital-born companies\u27 approaches seems problematic, as incumbent firms are distinct from their digital competitors. Thus, this research aims to consolidate what we know about scaling agility in incumbent firms. To answer this question, I conduct a structured literature review to understand scaling agility for incumbent firms better, resulting in the four dimensions of structure, methodology, governance, and dependencies with nine themes: coordination, processes, roles, effectiveness, risk management, budgeting, measurement, architecture, and culture/mindset. Moreover, the review develops six avenues for future research. With this, the literature review provides an integrative picture of scaling agility, enhances conceptual clarity, and helps practitioners by providing an overview to use in their efforts to scaling agility in incumbent firms

HOW AGILE IS YOUR IT DEPARTMENT? – DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF AN FRAMEWORK-INDEPENDENT AGILE SCALING MATURITY MODEL

Many IT departments seek to capitalize on the benefits of agile development by scaling agile practices. To manage the complex scaling, established approaches and frameworks promise guidance. However, although existing works envision a clear target state, they lack relevant capabilities along the scaling process, especially for vertical agile scaling. Managers need these capabilities to assess their company’s status quo and develop a clear scaling roadmap. Thus, within this work, we use the Design Science Research paradigm to build and evaluate a framework-independent agile scaling maturity model that provides management with a tool for ex-ante identification and evaluation of agile scaling capabilities in five maturity stages. To evaluate our model, we applied it at KUKA IT, the IT department of an international provider of automation solutions. As a result, this work provides insights into the application and outlines how IT departments can operationalize and utilize our model to guide agile scaling

ICT Governance: Towards Federalized Structure and Solution

The ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Governance means actively identifying the service needs of the Government and her customers and to focus on planning and delivering these services to meet availability, performance, and security requirements. It also aims at managing service level agreements to meet agreed-upon security, quality and cost targets. Successful operation of an ICT unit of the government would require it to be fully integrated with the complete lifecycle of Government’s processes, improving service quality and Government agility. The paper identifies appropriate international standards for ICT Governance, and ICT Management around which solutions for ICT governance should be built.ict; governance; management; service delivery