11. Building Agile Enterprises: A Model-Based Approach to Rapid Realization of Business Value

Agility is a key ability of enterprises, but agility does not come for free. Organizations need to choose where to focus their efforts in becoming more agile. This chapter describes an integrated approach for the development of agile enterprises, based on sound engineering principles. This approach uses various types of models and analysis instruments from the business architecture field. Further, this chapter shows how virtualization techniques can contribute to business agility. This is against the background of an increased focus on “data as an asset”—independent of the systems that currently hold the data—that represents an important development for many organizations. As a matter of fact, many organizations also face increased reporting requirements (due to ever changing legislation, for example). Finally, having agility on a per-system basis is not enough, because you run the risk of building agile silos. The role of architecture in fostering enterprise-wide coherence and in bridging the gap between strategy and execution thus is the final topic of this chapter.