IT Deserves More Credit for Driving Business Agility

One of things about IT that a lot of people don’t always appreciate is just how much influence IT trends exert over business. Everywhere you go, business people are talking about the need for their businesses to become more agile.

Top Missteps of Newly Agile Enterprises

Of course, that’s a concept that’s been floating around the application development community for years now. Agile development methodologies have transformed not only the amount of time it takes to develop the application, but increasingly the way IT is managed.

Now a recent survey of 100 IT executives at the recent Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit conducted by Serena Software, a provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) software, suggests the next step is really aligning the way the business is managed to the simple fact that IT is becoming more agile.

Of course, to a degree, this is a classic chicken-and-egg conversation. But given the fact that agile development methodologies have been in vogue much longer than the awareness of the need to create agile businesses, it’s fair to say that the speed at which software is being developed is starting to influence the way business people think.

In fact, Miguel Tam, senior products marketing manager for Serena Software, says that the plus side of the sudden downturn in the economy is that it made a lot of business people more receptive to some new ideas, regardless of where they may have originated.

That may not necessarily mean that the traditional divide between IT and the rest of the business is closing. But it does suggest that some of the concepts now being applied to manage the business are actually derivative of trends occurring in the IT organization rather than the other way around.