Foreword

To thrive in a world of digital disruption and continuous change, we must become agile. How are you becoming agile? I’ve spent the majority of my career leading and advising businesses on designing new operating and engagement models to drive digital transformation and achieve enterprise Agility through the adoption of fundamentally different ways of working, thinking, and being.

How are you responding to and managing change in your environment? In my most recent executive role in corporate America, I served as a CIO and chief agilist for a Fortune 50 company in the financial services industry. The adoption of agile’s core values in the software delivery processes at this $35 billion financial services company led to enormous improvements in speed, quality, and productivity—faster, better, cheaper! Yet, several years into this transformation, we reached the edges of scalability and sustainability. It was only then that we began to ask questions: “What else must we transform to better deliver the capabilities our customers need when they need them? Is it possible that agile matters because it enables enterprise agility?”

Are you in the midst of a transformation or are you transforming? I have discovered that scale is ultimately about creating a lean governance framework that can support networks of empowered teams, relevant measures, and new operating and engagement models. It’s a bit more complicated than just standing up more agile teams or adopting the agile mindset.

Enterprise agility is a measure of the ability of the entire organization to respond rapidly to change. As each new opportunity or threat appears, the agile enterprise fluidly remolds itself by deploying its resources to seize the advantage, thereby remaining responsive to the current environment and relevant to the future environment. The agile enterprise recognizes that every aspect of the business has to embrace change. Every aspect of the business has to become agile—from how the CEO sets objectives to how the janitor cleans the floors.

EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation will help you unleash the promise of agile. It will help you build the capabilities to transform. And it will demand that you develop the capacity to embrace and lead change.

Like the “Courageous Executives,” the authors of this book are boundless in their thinking, bold in their actions, and passionate about technology. This passion for technology allows them to recognize that for most enterprises in the 21st century, technology is THE business. This is what really separates the EDGE approach. It is a comprehensive operating model with technology at its core, while holistically embracing the four dimensions that make a difference today—speed, adaptability, iterative, and driven by customer value.

Enterprise sustainability demands that organizations are designed for business agility and responsiveness. As the authors astutely point out, the question isn’t “Are you able to move fast?” Instead, the question is “Are you able to move fast enough?” Having a clear approach to building the link between strategy and execution—that is, connecting vision to value delivery—will help you transform your organization to adapt fast enough. It will lead you to internal agility—the ability to make significant internal changes fast—which is the defining characteristic of the agile enterprise. To achieve this level of agility, every last corporate internal reflex has to change.

Regardless of where you are on your journey of transforming, know that your digital transformation is ambitious and fraught with great risks and challenges. Also, be comforted in the knowledge that if you embrace change and are willing to ask for help, you can lead your organization to operate in fundamentally different ways.

—Heidi Musser,

Executive Vice President and Principal Consultant,

Leading Agile; retired, Vice President and CIO, USAA