Agile on the rebound

[Robert Hillard]

In August of last year I was asked to write an article for the end-of-year issue of Information Age about what I thought was important in 2010.  As we all know, the last year has been tumultuous and predicting what was important in the next month has been hard enough let alone predicting the next year.

Nonetheless, I’m always up for a challenge, wrote the article and then promptly forgot about it.  When the magazine came out, I was curious to re-read what I’d written.  The theme of the article was a focus on agility in the face of uncertainty.  This is easy to say, but writing for the CIO audience I emphasised that in tough times business tries to reduce cost (which means focusing on efficiency of existing processes) and defend against market events (which means emergency system changes).  Neither of these trends generally leads to flexible business systems.

In the article I suggest the demand that will come during the recovery will be unpredictable, making life for the reactive CIO almost impossible.  I used books which many non-technology executives will have read (The Black Swan and Predictably Irrational) to help CIOs to make the case to focus on the data asset.

The article is available online: Information Age (Agile on the rebound).



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