The Agile Executive

Cutter Consortium has published predictions for 2010 by about a dozen of its experts. My own prediction, which examines the crash of 1929, the burst of the “dot-com bubble” in 2000 and the financial collapse in 2008, is actually quite bullish:

I expect 2010 to be the first year of a prolonged golden age. Serious as the various problems we all are wrestling with after the 2008-2009 macro-economic crisis are, they should be viewed as systemic to the way a new generation of revolutionary infrastructure gets assimilated in economy and society.

In addition to the techno-economic view expressed in the Cutter prediction, here are my Agile themes for 2010:

• Agile moves “downstream” into Release Management.
• Agile breaks out of Development into IT (and beyond) in the form of Agile Infrastructure and Agile Business Service Management.
• SOA and Agile start to be linked in enterprise architecture and software/hardware/SaaS organizations.
• Kanban starts an early adoption cycle similar to Scrum in 2006.

Acknowledgements: I am thankful to my colleagues Walter Bodwell, Sebastian Hassinger, Erik Huddleston, Michael Cote and Annie Shum who influenced my thinking during 2009 and contributed either directly and indirectly to the themes listed above.