What is Agile IT?

Over the past couple of decades, information technology (IT) has made a deep impact on business productivity. In spite of these gains, many enterprises are finding that today’s IT operating models are unable to keep up with the rate of market change. Enterprises continue to see market opportunities which they are unable to exploit because their IT operating model cannot react quickly enough before the opportunities dissipate.

The term “Agile IT” has been created to describe an IT operating model, supported by a range of technologies and processes, that can react more quickly to these transient opportunities and deliver greater business value to business operating units. While Agile IT is a high-level term that encompasses a number of different technologies and operating methodologies, the following statements generally hold true:

  • First and foremost, Agile IT seeks alignment to the rest of the enterprise. Agile IT recognizes that IT is not an end in itself, but rather a strategic weapon in pursuit of the enterprise’s overall business goals.
  • Agile IT is characterized by an aggressive movement toward delivering all IT functions “as a service.” This includes raw infrastructure, platforms, and software. These are commonly referred to as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS). This aggressive everything-as-a-service orientation is sometimes called “XaaS” or “IT-as-a-service.”
  • IT service consumers can allocate IT resources on-demand, using self-service management portals. This enterprises to bring IT resources to bear on business problems in a matter of minutes instead of waiting weeks or months.
  • By streamlining and reducing the cost of new application development, Agile IT lowers the cost of failure and in return fosters greater risk taking and innovation.
  • Agile IT embraces external service providers to deliver both standardized and novel IT resources in combination with internal service offerings.
  • Governance is handled through lean governance models based on pervasive federated identity management in combination with extensive policy management. The goal here is to eliminate long manual approval cycles for the majority of IT resource allocation decisions.
  • Agile IT exposes IT econometrics to the business so that IT spend is more efficiently allocated and aligned with overall business objectives.

In the years ahead, companies that make the shift to an Agile IT operating model can expect to deliver greater market impact, customer satisfaction, and shareholder value.