BNET Business Dictionary
Business Definition for: Agility
- the organizational capability to be flexible, responsive, adaptive, and show initiative in times of change and uncertainty. Agility has origins in manufacturing and has been cited as a source of competitive advantage by many management gurus, including Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Tom Peters. One writer who has explored the concept of agility in greater depth is Richard Pascale, for whom the key to agility lies in what the organization is, as opposed to what it does. Agility grew as a reaction against the slowness of bureaucratic organizations to respond to changing market conditions. The virtual organization has been quoted as one extreme example of an agile organization.
Wiktionary Definition for: Agility
- The quality of being agile; the power of moving the limbs quickly and easily; nimbleness; activity; quickness of motion; as, strength and agility of body.
Additional Resources
- The Essence Of Business Agility
- In this cutthroat, weakness-revealing economy, companies can no longer afford to ignore the problem of managerial procrastination, so the case for agility is obvious. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the article suggests that line managers represent the basic building blocks of agility and lists three emerging prerequisites for corporate agility. It...
- White papers 2002-09-01
- The Impact of Work Force Agility on Business Performance
- Agility is an issue that is becoming more and more prominent in businesses across industries. While it is a common goal, its meaning can be somewhat ambiguous. Depending on the context, agility can mean different things to different organizational units. But one common thread persists: the accelerating speed of change....
- White papers 2007-11-16
- BPO Viewpoint: When Agility Outweighs Efficiency
- Agility may soon overtake efficiency in terms of its importance to businesses and government. Business process outsourcing BPO is one of the keys to maintaining agility, but BPO must mature into transformational and business-utility relationships. This white paper describes how the most innovative outsourcing approaches will provide visibility into the...
- White papers 2004-04-05
- Agility Could Sign $2.5 Billion U.S. Army Deal: Report
- KUWAIT (<a href="http://resources.bnet.com/index.php?source=Reuters">Reutersa>) - Kuwait's Agility AGLT, the Gulf's biggest logistics provider by market value, is set to sign a $2.5 billion deal with the U.S. army in July, a newspaper reported on Sunday. The deal would include supplying food and providing ...
- News items 2008-06-07
- Managing Rules (And Achieving Agility) With Business Process Management
- The pressure is on for IT to deliver applications that can change on a dime - evolving as quickly as the business evolves even in the face of uncertain requirements. To address these challenges, new programming models - such as extreme programming and iterative development - have emerged. The primary...
- White papers 2006-01-31
- Agility Is the Next Talent Management Imperative
- Competent businesses are adept at hiring and firing workers. Great businesses however are skilled at developing and deploying talent in ways that continuously grow their experience, stretch their abilities and enable their achievements. Creating work environments that promote people agility across jobs and organizational boundaries is the next imperative for...
- White papers 2005-06-22
- Agility Through Scenario Development And Continuous Implementation
- This paper examines a business and IS/IT initiative at Volvo that involves managing the development and implementation of an agile aftermarket supply chain. The case is based on Volvo's global initiative to create a platform, Web services, and a Web portal for selling spare parts over the Internet. Creating and...
- White papers 2006-01-09
- Maximizing the Efficiency of Employee Communications through Alignment - II
- "This article look at how subtle but distinct differences between what leaders are saying about the initiative and what they are actually doing can hinder organizational agility, performance and productivity. When there is misalignment between what is "said" and what is "done" in an organization, employees will be likely to...
- White papers 2003-01-01
- The Agile IT Architecture
- With companies worldwide under pressure to develop greater 'business agility', technology vendors and analysts are praising the benefits of the 'service oriented enterprise' business processes broken down into manageable and measurable components, supported by information technology, and treated as services by internal and external users. Creating an agile IT framework...
- White papers 2005-03-18
- Logistics And Supply Chain Management (SCM)
- As competition becomes more global, innovation is moving from a firm-to-firm level to a supply chain versus supply chain perspective. Canadian firms must develop supply chain agility in a Just-In-Time JIT and mass customisation mode. This paper explains measurement of logistics and Supply Chain Management SCM Key Performance Indicators KPI...
- White papers 2006-10-01
- Companies Be Nimble
- The casual business observer might conclude that after a decade devoted to re-engineering, restructuring and realigning, CEOs must have achieved their ideal business models. But, a great deal of painful work lies ahead. The ultimate goal is an agile organization with the flexibility to quickly read and heed shifting competitive...
- White papers 2003-12-01
- Creating Focus, Alignment and Agility With SAS Strategic Performance Management
- This white paper gives an overview of the dash boarding and score carding capabilities of SAS Strategic Performance Management. The paper describes the progression from focus to alignment to agility that these capabilities facilitate using advanced data access, alerts and traffic lighting, and dynamic diagramming functions. It also informs about...
- White papers 2004-10-18
- Business Process Management: Facilitating Enterprise Agility
- BPM Business Process Management helps an enterprise to make on-the-fly changes to its processes and ensure compliance with the changes that are mandated by market conditions and the information technology infrastructure in an enterprise. BPM will play a significant and enabling role in the future to help enterprises achieve agility....
- White papers 2006-07-01
- The Agile 100
- Suddenly, agility is in the air. In the cautious optimism of the postrecession, preboom economy, agility - the ability to adapt quickly to changing business conditions and take advantage of rapidly emerging opportunities - has become the sine qua non of organizational fitness. Conferences are devoted to it; technology advertising...
- White papers 2004-08-15
- Charting the Path to Enterprise Agility
- Business analysts and technology vendors alike are heralding the arrival of the next phase of evolution in business computing. It is being fueled by a new generation of IT systems, business process outsourcing options and industry standards. This new phase goes by many names, including business process fusion, real-time enterprise,...
- White papers 2005-03-18
- The Changing Structure of Innovation in Computing: Sources of and Threats to the Dominant U.S. Position
- One management process and organizational system that is of important concern in knowledge management is agility. The development of Information Communication Technology ICT in the era of globalization and competitive business environment indicates that agile organizations are able to better sustain in a competitive and volatile industry. By means of...
- White papers 2005-01-19
- Strategic Sourcing of IT Infrastructure Services to Enable Business Agility: A Conceptual Framework
- Well-planned Information Technology IT Infrastructure services are critical for companies pursuing strategic agility. The traditional bricks-and-mortar organisation and the virtual organisation cannot be separated as easily as they have in the past. Companies are organising themselves both physically and virtually, from their Customers to their Supply Chains. In the process...
- White papers 2003-11-24
- The Split Personality of BPM
- This paper explores the link between Business Strategy, BPM Technology, and Process Architectures - specifically, highlighting the need for, and difficulty in achieving both procedural 'control' and business 'agility'. It discusses some of the challenges for Business Process Management Systems BPMS - how they can support revolutionary objectives, yet provide...
- White papers 2004-02-01
- Supply Chain Process Design Toolkit (SCPDT)
- A characteristic that will distinguish successful manufacturing enterprises of the next millennium is agility: the ability to respond quickly, proactively, and aggressively to unpredictable change. The use of extended virtual enterprise Supply Chains SC to achieve agility is becoming increasingly prevalent. A key problem in constructing effective SCs is the...
- White papers 2001-11-14
- A New Era Of Intelligent Communications: Driving Agility Through Business Communications Applications
- The world may not literally be flat, but it's smaller than ever thanks to a convergence of social, business and technological trends, e.g., inexpensive telecommunications, global trade, open standards, internet technologies. Now a whole new category of business communications applications and services promises to compress the world even further, connecting...
- White papers 2005-05-01
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