When it comes to agile adoption, IT enterprises nowadays are facing several challenges. For example, how to keep up with their own innovation and acts as a creative start-up, respond to changing market conditions while keeping budgets in sync, and transform the entire whole IT department by agile methodologies.

Michael Azoff of Ovum recently had an interview with Infoq, where he talked about creating Agile enterprises. Azoff is a Principal Analyst at Ovum and lead the software development and lifecycle management research, which includes especially agile methodologies and lean related topics. Azoff stresses importance on three areas for creating the agile enterprise: innovation management, organization management, and IT department agility, and advocates the lean startup approach which is again the solution to innovation management.

“If successful companies are to remain successful innovation must be a high priority. What caught my attention recently is innovation in the process of innovation, such as Lean Startup. The second area, organization management, is another big topic in its own right with countless management gurus and MBA courses peddling their versions of the truth – what for me is interesting is that there is a movement called Beyond Budgeting which has a lot in common with agile and lean thinking, and it strikes me that for the right organization culture it could make the difference in surviving beyond those current 18 years lifespan. Finally, IT department agility is critical for organizations given the pivotal role IT has in businesses today; being agile can improve the gap between strategy and vision and the reality of what is delivered. Agile practices originated with developers and are being grown through the rest of the IT department by DevOps – the end result is ideally agility and leanness throughout the IT function.”

According to Azoff, it’s a good idea to apply a lean startup within an enterprise, but there needs to be clear demarcation lines drawn up to protect the reputation and reduce risk to the parent company. Once the relationship is clearly defined, incubators can have the freedom to act as startups. Plus, it’s better to focus on customer development before product development as even the best product can fail if people fail to understand whether anyone would want to buy it. He suggests cohort analysis a good approach for web based businesses.

One should not go for implementing new processes and methodologies in an organization just because it is in fashion. Azoff says that if waterfall model and traditional models like annual budgeting are working well for them, theirs is no reason to switch to new processes. But again, most IT enterprises are successful when working on DevOps and Agile methodologies. A good approach to start with this is to originate from C-level executives or a top-down approach (at least, initially) and then have motivated individuals throughout the organization at all levels.