The CIO's Guide to Enterprise Agility in the Post-Pandemic Era

This IDC Perspective identifies the factors that are critical to aligning stakeholders around the concept of agility, with key, actionable takeaways for CIOs in an enterprise agility leadership role.The post-pandemic era has been a period of rapidly shifting consumer sentiment, business requirements, and geopolitical uncertainty that requires organizations to react quickly, pivot on a dime, and operate seamlessly as a close team. We have entered a digital-first economy. We often speak of the need to enhance resilience to cope with our new reality, but that is truly the baseline needed to sustain our organizations. What is also needed is an IT organization that helps the enterprise anticipate and make the most of the rapidly changing environment. What is required is agility at an enterprise level.Like agility in software development, agility at the enterprise level stands to deliver great benefits. And both software development agility and enterprise agility face challenges with successful adoption. CIOs must navigate this changing environment, supporting and driving improvement in the departmental use of Agile development and helping guide the business toward enterprise agility, leveraging lessons learned from development teams. The path to this more holistic embrace of agility involves a reconceptualization of IT leadership and the IT organization. This document lays out key questions to ask along the journey to enterprise agility, such as:Does the business have the willingness to take on this transformation?What is required to get from operational agility to strategic agility?How should stakeholder needs be prioritized?What language, or shared vocabulary, will be used to discuss operating concepts?Where is Agile the best fit, and where must organizations complement it with other approaches?"Today is the time to come together as an Agile global team. We need to be inspired by the best practices inherited from each corner of the organization and generate an Agile way at the enterprise level. CIOs must lead," says Serge Findling, vice president of research for IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP).