Business Agility in Technology Companies

Abstract

Agile approaches have been used in the software business for many years. However, the agile approaches can bring a lot of velocity to many other business areas. Many authors have reported that using agile business approaches instead of conventional business approaches has addressed the needs of productivity in the current era. For successful implementation of the agile business concept in a company, the maturity for using this approach should be evaluated. This paper presents the results of a survey which was carried out regarding agile business issues in the light of maturity. Specifically, the ability of companies to adopt agile approaches was assessed based on the five-level maturity model of which level 5 shows the highest maturity. The results show that most companies are mainly at level three regarding open innovation and business agility. It is recommended that companies should also focus on the actions required at levels four and five. Because of the content of levels four and five, we suggest that company strategies should be aligned with agile strategies based on the agile business concept. We also argue that corporate change management skills are needed to realize levels four and/or five.