Recycled Bullsh-IT

Are you agile? Would you like to be? Unfortunately, it’s not just yoga trainers pushing agility these days. All the desperate IT vendors are looking for a new label (other than Cloud) to tempt people to look again at their wares, dressing it up in terms of ‘Business Agility’ or ‘Organisational Flexibility’. It makes my joints ache just thinking about it…

 I have written a few rants about agile over the years.  Just about every presentation and vendor pitch these days majors on how their product/solution/widget will make your company more agile. I would like to say that it is all highly original and refreshing. However, I would be fibbing and, dear reader, you would be cruelly deceived. It has certainly activated my bullshit detector on a number of occasions, and I have gasped in admiration at some of the stretches in logic that some presenters have used to fit ‘agile’ into their pitch.

 Yes, I know I’m an old cynic, but I do object to bandwagon-hopping, when it is patently obvious that the vendors are shoehorning the latest buzzwords into their marketing puff without understanding the meaning and context of the terms. So let me give you a buyer’s guide to agility:

 Agile:  Being nimble in the face of unexpected obstacles.  Also, the current umbrella label for the iterative prototyping school of application development. See Scrum, XP, Kanban, etc

 Agility: Nimbleness in the face of unexpected obstacles.  Also, the ability of IT to actually deliver a business project within 3 years of being asked to

 Business Agility: The ability of an organisation to survive in the face of market or competitive pressure. (i.e., those still standing after 2 years of pandemic panic). Now, the guaranteed outcome of buying a bunch of disparate software tools from so-called Agile vendors. (Does agile software jump out of the way when you are trying to use it?)

 Ultimate Agility: a horizontal ladder used in dog show competitions. Also, a meaningless phrase originally touted by a two-letter company better known for printers. Now re-appearing as desperate consultancies scramble to differentiate on agile through cynical hyperbole

 So, there you are. Hopefully, you can now navigate the agile world with the confidence of the slightly less ignorant, in the face of the totally insincere IT supplier in front of you spouting this nonsense. Of course, real business agility is about effective communication and devolving and delegating authority to where decisions need to be made. Unfortunately, you can’t buy a tool to do this…

John “Nimble” Moe