The Agile Executive

Christian Sarkar and I started an e-dialog on Agile Business Service Management in BSMReview. Both of us are keenly interested in exploring the broad application of Agile BSM in the context of Gartner’s Top Ten Technologies for 2010. To quote Christian:

Israel, where do agile practices fit into this? Just about everywhere as well?

The short answer to Christian’s good question is as follows:

I consider the principles articulated in the Manifesto For Agile Software Development  http://agilemanifesto.org universal and timeless. They certainly apply just about everywhere. As a matter of fact, we are seeing the Manifesto principles applied more and more to the development of hardware and content.

The fascinating thing in what we are witnessing (see, for example: Scale in London  – Part II, An Omen in Chicago, Depth in Seattle, and Richness and Vibrancy in Boston) is the evolution of the classical problem of managing multiple Software Development Life Cycles. Instead of dealing with one ‘material’ (software), we handle multiple ‘materials’ (software, hardware, content, business initiative, etc.) of dissimilar characteristics. The net effect is as follows:

The challenge then becomes the simultaneous and synchronized management of two or more ‘substances’ (e.g. software and content; software, content and business initiative; or, software, hardware, content and business initiative) of different characteristics under a unified process. It is conceptually fairly similar to the techniques used in engineering composite materials.

Ten years have passed since Evans and Wurster demonstrated the effects of separating the virtual from the physical. As software becomes pervasive, we are now starting to explore putting the virtual back together with the physical through a new generation of software moulding methods.