Can We Truly Measure Business Systems 'Agility'?

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January 24, 2008

Can We Truly Measure Business Systems 'Agility'?

In this blogsite and many others, we constantly talk about business systems "agility" as the holy grail of service-oriented architecture, business analytics, and everything else.

But what exactly is agility, and how do we know when we have it?

That's the intriguing question put forth by Cliff Longman, chief technology officer for Kalido: "The industry talks about 'agile' systems, and 'flexible IT'. Could someone propose a way to BENCHMARK agility?"

Cliff suggests that perhaps agility should be measured in the amount of time it takes to change an application may be a yardstick for agility. "Some people would say that adding a new hierarchy to an existing BI application in less than a month is 'agile'. Some would say that only less than a week is 'agile'. Some say that only less than a day is agile."

Is there a way of putting a quantitative value on agility of business systems? Readers, we'd love to get your thoughts on what, exactly, is meant by 'agility,' and how that can be measured, if at all.

Posted by joemckendrick in Management | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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Comments

Time is not the only factor in determining the business agility. I would say, that an enterprise is agile, if the enterprise can respond to the business challenge in the time and cost so that the opportunity is not lost, because of the system limitation, more than 50% of time.

Harinath Pottam

Posted by: Harinath Pottam at February 25, 2008 01:21 AM