What is Agility?

Agility is an enterprise-wide strategy for responding to a competitive and changing business environment. It is based on four cardinal principles:

• Enrich the customer
• Master change
• Mobilise resources
• Co-operate to compete

The value of agility is to increase an organisation's competitiveness . . .

(the agility view is that competitiveness has to be earned through continually matching products and services to what customers will buy)

. . . in conditions of change

(agility uniquely not only recognizes change, but identifies its impact on competitiveness and sets out a strategy for becoming proficient at change).

The following table presents the mission and top level strategies that make an organisation agile. Each of the top level agile strategies shown here summarises a web of more detailed, integrated strategies in our Agility Model.

Agile Principles	Enrich the customer	Master change	Mobilise resources	Co-operate to compete
Agile Mission	Provide solutions that customers value	Be ready to respond to any change in the business environment	Make every asset add value to the bottom line	Make partnering a strategy of choice
Top-level Agile Strategies	Customized, niche solutions, not mass-market products Customer collaboration	Change proficiency Reconfigurable operations and infrastructure Information transparency Flexible operations Rapid response	Entrepreneurial environment Empowered people Virtual teamwork Knowledge management	Proficiency in partnering Virtual organisations
©Agility International 2002

Background to Agility

Agility was developed in the USA under a Federal program mounted in response to Congressional concern about the declining profitability of American industry.

A comprehensive, integrated set of agility business strategies, models, best practices and case studies was developed over six years of strategic research by The Agility Forum at the Iacocca Institute, Pennsylvania (affiliated with Lehigh University). Between 1991 and 1998 the Agility Forum, led by an industry leadership committee, ran research programs, training and awareness events, a yearly national conference and regular nation-wide meetings of interest groups. Over 150 leading enterprises created agility programs, including Boeing, Goodyear, IBM, Kodak, Pitney Bowes, Texas Instruments and Xerox.

The seminal agility publication arising from this work was Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations by Goldman, Nagel and Preiss, who defined the baseline structure and principles of agility.

We interpreted that work and created the Agility Model (summarised above) for the network-enabled enterprise in our 1998 book Agile Networking: Competing Through the Internet and Intranets.

On the next page, we describe the emergence of business agility.