Guide:
To address globalization and a variety of internal and external challenges, companies must increase their level of responsiveness. Flexibility increases the responsiveness of organizations, processes, and systems, but only a few approaches can do so. In addition to embedding flexibility into the system at the outset, other ways to improve the level of response are costly. To survive in a changing environment and cope with market volatility, a new concept is needed. This concept is called agile.
It friends around them said that this year their new orders are getting less and less, and the good news has not been sent for a long time.
"This year is very difficult" "the industry is getting more and more volume".
The situation is rarely well known.
I have to say that today's business environment makes people who start a business think and think carefully. Because the survival and success of the enterprise is becoming more and more difficult. Especially for the rapidly changing business environment and the IT industry with rapid product iteration, it is necessary to keep up with market demand.
You can never wake up a person who pretends to be asleep
But in many cases, the developers only want to produce the version, but the reaction to the market is often the direction of the product and the direction of the actual demand development, like two middle-aged couples who no longer communicate, the surface efforts to cooperate, the actual has long been separated.
Because the performance of many developers is not directly linked to the market reaction, it is the same reason that you can never wake up a person who pretends to be asleep.
The spread of agile in IT is indeed a long and laborious process.
Relatively stable part
Although the business environment has changed, it is relatively stable, in other words, every time the product is developed, there are still more or less people to pay, after all, not all customers are rushing to the forefront of business changes, committed to continuously optimizing the development of the industry. Even if it is a fundamental change, the speed of downward execution is relatively slow, and it will not trigger other major changes anytime soon. In this relatively stable environment, enterprises will not respond quickly and actively to internal and external emergencies.
Unstable parts
Changes and events in the economic environment are generally predictable. However, technology, innovation, public policy changes, and regulation are destabilizing. Different orders are appearing more and more frequently, and the boundaries of the industry are becoming more and more blurred, such as the integration of finance and IT. Regulatory changes are a major reason for industry changes.
So overall, Agile enables businesses to quickly identify and respond to unpredictable events to meet changing customer needs.
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Agile Forum define agile as:
Agile is the ability to continuously succeed in unexpected environmental changes; The agile concept was established by a group of different industrial companies as part of a plan to improve and maintain the underlying competitive advantage of American manufacturing. - Sarkis
In recent years, lean, flexible and agile have gradually become strategic organizational philosophies that have attracted the attention of researchers.
Lean Manufacturing: Eliminate waste and minimize resource use.
Flexible manufacturing: It is not so much a strategy as a structure that facilitates the reconfiguration and customization of the production chain.
Agile Manufacturing: A strategy that encompasses lean manufacturing and flexible manufacturing to develop world-class companies and competitiveness.
"IT Strategy Alignment"
Industry 4.0 is an inevitable revolution that encompasses a wide range of emerging technologies such as cyber-physical systems, radio frequency identification, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data analytics, and advanced robotics. The Industry 4.0 paradigm is transforming businesses in many industries, such as automotive, logistics, aerospace, defense, and energy. More and more academic research is focused on Industry 4.0 technology and implementation issues. Industry 4.0 supports real-time planning and control, allowing companies to respond flexibly and agilely to rapidly changing environments. For example, reduce planning cycles and freeze cycles by reacting more quickly to changes in demand, supply, and prices. Business analytics methods provide the ability to predict future events and patterns such as customer behavior, delivery times, and manufacturing yields. Real-time delivery paths and tracking also give organizations flexibility, efficiency, and agility.
Industry 4.0 brought the term "IT strategy alignment", and how to present the strategy as comprehensively as possible in the information system is a difficult point. For information systems to work, the strategy must be clear. There are controls and responses to internal and external pressures on companies, and information systems need to make many essentially rapid changes, which may include technology, applications, organizational processes, and people. The information system is agile enough to align with the company's strategy.
The following is a sample interview table (partial) of the service management maturity assessment given by Strategic Information System Agile, which can be used by IT companies to assess the level of service management of the company.
After the evaluation is completed according to the contents of the above table, we may find that for the current information system, the degree of close correlation with the business system will be more or less insufficient.
Digital transformation has become a top priority for businesses, and we are in an era of moving from digital transformation to digital priority. In order to achieve business goals, companies are beginning to prioritize the deployment and application of various digital technologies to enhance their competitiveness. The digital-first strategy requires information systems to be scaled, continuous, contextualized and real-time. IT systems need to meet these requirements by achieving their own agility.
Strategic Information Systems Agile provides comprehensive coverage of the elements necessary to develop and implement effective Strategic Information Systems Agile, including the concepts, theory, modeling, and architecture of Information Systems Agile. Based on the comprehensive consideration of the environment, the current situation of information technology development and the overall trend of information system agility, this book proposes the latest technologies, concepts and methods for developing strategic information systems to help enterprises formulate information system processes suitable for the present.