97. Closed-Loop Agile Development Delivers Efficiency and Compliance in Industry 4.0 in the Regulated Sector

Industry 4.0 depends on information systems and technology that must continuously adapt to rapidly changing business needs. It is therefore critical that the delivery of new technology can support frequent changes in business processes, customer needs, and new regulations. This dynamic environment drives supply chain strategies from procurement to production, inventory, and sales that in turn drive the pervasive need for faster digitalization and deployment of automation. With the technology heterogeneity and concomitant complexities resulting from decades of IT development, it has become essential that we create Agile software engineering methods to not only reduce cycle time and improve efficiency, but also build in robust controls for regulatory requirements, cybersecurity, data governance, safety, and reliability. The wide variety of systems and infrastructure in use at most companies today make predicting the impact of change challenging. We present here an analysis of a large body of IT projects across a variety of industries. Our model shows that early-stage quality metrics are highly predictive of later success. By efficiently incorporating a heuristically tailored SDLC, and related quality steps and measures, the gap between poor and excellent performance in IT delivery can be substantially closed. The data also supports implementation of a “closed-loop” IT delivery model that largely eliminates defects that can accrue during the programming and testing stages of large systems development projects.