Is Agility the next Holy Grail for IT?

What do Monty Python and Indiana Jones have in common with today’s IT? All undertook a quest – a quest for a Holy Grail. IT’s new Holy Grail is called the cloud.

The cloud promises agility, speed, dynamic and real time engagement – get to the cloud so we can become agile “like Google” is the mandate in front of IT organizations today! Cloud will enable IT to move at the speed of business, to move at the speed of the customer. IT needs to transform to become agile. This time IT is transforming to the cloud. Is agility the next Holy Grail for IT? Yes, it absolutely is.

This is a nice vision. But what does agility look like? What does being agile mean? How do we know when we have it? If the goal is agility – What does success look like? Here is my take. (Spoiler alert: being agile means getting your information systems – and ultimately your organization future ready.)

Being agile means:

Not accepting conventional wisdom, and being ready to change the rules In this video Malcolm Gladwell talks about the story of David vs. Goliath to illustrate how not following convention can change the rules of the game
Becoming an orchestrator of loosely coupled transactional systems (services grids) with an ecosystem of partners to build and deliver goods and services to customers – learn more about services grids in this paper
Putting interoperability at the core of everything your organization does – interoperability is a foundational requirement to becoming an orchestrator
Putting control and access for engagement directly into the hands of your customer – this requires a fluid, elastic infrastructure that can respond to the ebbs and flows of customer interactions

Ultimately, being agile means getting your organization into a position where you are able to shape and mold the future versus being a target to forces outside of your control. At Dell we have a saying for this – we call it being “Future Ready.”

Cloud and agility are intertwined. At Dell we are delivering on our mission to accelerate our customer’s journey to cloud computing with OpenStack cloud solutions to help make their organizations future ready. If your plans include attending the upcoming OpenStack Summit event make sure to attend a Dell session or stop by the Dell Expo #S11 to learn more about becoming agile and Future Ready.