Business agility

Business agility is the "ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration". Business agility can be maintained by maintaining and adapting goods and services to meet customer demands, adjusting to the changes in a business environment and taking advantage of human resources.

In a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. The agile enterprise is an extension of this concept, referring to an organization that uses key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success. One can say that business agility is the outcome of organizational intelligence.

The agile enterprise strives to make change a routine part of organizational life to reduce or eliminate the organizational trauma that paralyzes many businesses attempting to adapt to new markets and environments. Because change is perpetual, the agile enterprise is able to nimbly adjust to and take advantage of emerging opportunities. The agile enterprise views itself as an integral component of a larger system whose activities produce a ripple effect of change both within the enterprise itself and the broader system.

Enterprise architecture as a discipline supports business agility through a wealth of techniques, including layering, separation of concerns, architecture frameworks, and the separation of dynamic and stable components. The model of hierarchical complexity—a framework for scoring the complexity of behavior developed by Michael Commons and others since the 1980s—has been adapted to describe the stages of complexity in enterprise architecture.

One type of enterprise architecture that supports agility is a non-hierarchical organization without a single point of control. Individuals function autonomously, constantly interacting with each other to define the vision and aims, maintain a common understanding of requirements and monitor the work that needs to be done. Roles and responsibilities are not predetermined but rather emerge from individuals' self-organizing activities and are constantly in flux. Similarly, projects are generated everywhere in the enterprise, sometimes even from outside affiliates. Key decisions are made collaboratively, on the spot, and on the fly. Because of this, knowledge, power, and intelligence are spread through the enterprise, making it uniquely capable of quickly recovering and adapting to the loss of any key enterprise component.

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