Making Agility an Ability

The IT world is full of brainy people with not enough time to think. Hence, the ever present need for researchers who can dive into its most pressing issues and surface with practical answers. Few research organizations are as respected as the Advanced Practices Council of the Society for Information Management. Its members, who decide on the research agenda, include CIOs from 34 major companies, government agencies and health care organizations including Allstate, BP, Chubb, General Services Administration, Johnson Controls and NASA. For 15 years, the APC has been led by program director Madeline Weiss, president of Weiss Associates in Bethesda, Md.; in 2004, one of the most prominent professors in the IT academic world, Blake Ives of the University of Houston's Bauer School of Business, became its research director.

In recent years, the pursuit of agility has been a running theme of APC research. We asked Weiss and Ives to discuss highlights from APC-sponsored studies on agility, as well as from some of the most important presentations by other academics about their independent work on the topic. The following is an edited version of their recent conversation with CIO Insight Executive Editor Allan Alter.

CIO INSIGHT: Why did APC-member CIOs feel it important to focus on agility at this time?

Weiss: As a result of competitive challenges and opportunities in the market, CIOs are more frequently being asked to quickly enable major acquisitions, mergers and changes in business models I call it "adaptive agility." In 2005, CVS acquired a significant number of Eckerd drugstores in the South, and the CIO of CVS, Carl Taylor, was asked to integrate these stores into CVS' information systems within six months to gain the expected economies of scale. Another example is Cemex, a Mexican company that had to very quickly change its business model from selling cement, a commodity product, to providing same-day cement delivery.