There are several reasons why organizations need a Disciplined Agile® approach to IT:
- IT is critical to the operations of modern organizations. There are very few business processes that do not involve some form of software-based automation. To survive, and more importantly to thrive, modern organizations need an effective IT infrastructure to run their business processes, ready access to digital intelligence upon which to make better decisions, and the ability to evolve their IT assets such as software and data to reflect new ways of working (WoW).
- IT is a key factor in your ability to innovate. Your organization faces a complex and constantly evolving environment, requiring you to be able to innovate quickly. Because your organization runs on software, you require IT excellence to be able to respond rapidly and execute on your organizational strategy.
- IT is complex, and growing more so. Your organization has been building, buying, integrating, and evolving IT-based solutions for years, and in some cases decades. Individual IT systems are complex, let alone the combination of them that your organization has. This complexity has to be managed, and better yet reduced, otherwise it will grow out of control and put your organization at risk.
- You want common IT infrastructure and capability. A DA™ approach to IT will provide common IT capabilities and supporting infrastructure across your value streams and organizational units. This requires a careful balancing act between your short-term need to respond quickly to market changes and your long-term enterprise operation.
- IT-based solutions vary. There is a myriad of technologies available to you, all of which are evolving, and new ones appear every day. The challenges that your organization faces also vary, often widely, requiring an appropriate approach to address each one. From an IT point of view, sometimes you need to purchase and integrate a commercial package, or work with a cloud-based external platform, or evolve existing legacy systems, or create a business-led Citizen Development (CD) solution, or create a bespoke IT solution, or combinations thereof. These efforts need to be managed and governed well.
- Undisciplined IT leads to growing technical debt. Technical debt refers to any quality issues within the implementation of an IT solution that hampers your ability to work with or evolve that solution. Technical debt is often thought of as a source code problem, but it also occurs in your user interface design, in your data sources, in your network architecture, and in many other places. The greater your technical debt, the more expensive it is to evolve your IT-based solutions and the slower it is to do so, reducing your organizational competitiveness.