Today’s IT systems teeter upon fragile foundations from a bygone era.

Withdrawing cash from an American bank at a sun-drenched ATM in Marrakech, it’s easy to be awed by technology’s advances. Most technology executives are painfully aware, however, that today’s IT systems teeter upon fragile foundations from a bygone era. 

Enterprises must make judicious choices when embracing new technologies. Adopt a loser, and you waste precious time and money. Adopt a winner too late, and you lose market share to competitors and new entrants.

Eight interrelated trends reveal the secrets to avoiding such costly mistakes. They are part of a whole new ecology of “enterprise agility” that is emerging across industries.

By looking holistically at the emerging technologies, decision-makers can see the wide-ranging business problems and opportunities shaping the new ecology. With a whole ecology for guidance and support, decision-makers can create and execute a first-mover strategy with confidence and without risking technology obsolescence.

The End of Legacy Systems
Today’s enterprises are hapless heirs to IT systems that, at best, no longer serve their needs. When they first emerged, IT systems were simply applications for discrete business processes. They each ran on their own hardware platforms and shared a trio of unwelcome traits:

• When two applications sought to interoperate, only one option was available: create an ad-hoc breach in both applications. Such point-to-point integration spawned hundreds of application stovepipes, with even simple modifications requiring utmost skill, lest the whole system collapse.
• Business processes became deeply embedded in the system’s innards, making them hard to change and impossible to re-use.
• Applications clung to the hardware on which they ran, a “box-per-application” approach that led to inelastic hardware capacity. One application would be starving for hardware resources while another was grossly underutilizing them. To avoid nail biting during peak usage, many enterprises reacted by building a fixed-cost, over-provisioned infrastructure.

The Ecology of Enterprise Agility
Most enterprises now recognize the need for legacy systems to be replaced with more flexible, efficient ones. But what will the new enterprise IT system look like? The end of legacy systems marks a new age for IT: the age of enterprise agility.

Agility has always been important to business. So, what’s different now?

Past technology waves have indeed strengthened enterprise agility, but this strength was confined to isolated business functions. PCs and client/servers improved worker productivity. The Internet sped up communications among customers, suppliers and business partners. ERP systems led to faster cycle times through business-process standardization and rationalization.

The new ecology, in contrast, has the potential to accelerate systemic, enterprise-wide agility. It is a robust ecology because it provides significant reinforcement and synergy across different trends. Its acceleration likely will be of unprecedented scale and scope.

Eight Trends Toward Agility
Eight key trends are poised to create a new IT ecology that is agile at all levels:

Trend #1 – Seamless interoperability: Integration is the goal of this trend, which turns monolithic IT applications into modular business services with standardized interfaces by exchanging messages in a standardized language. Out go the static, hard-wired stovepipe patches for interoperability that took months to build. In come on-the-fly exchanges of standards-based messages across different applications.

Trend #2 – Process-centric IT: While Trend #1 grapples with integration, Trend #2 offers a new way to execute complex business processes. Together, these two trends comprise service-oriented architecture (SOA), extricating business processes from IT systems and representing them formally in a business language.

Modular business services interoperate by exchanging messages. Process change no longer requires digging deep into IT systems; rather, business units can respond quickly to market conditions by changing the processes.

Trend #3 – Virtualized infrastructure: New technology is emerging to apportion processor cycles, storage and network bandwidth dynamically to different applications. This “virtualized” infrastructure frees applications from a single piece of hardware so they can use resources efficiently. Predictive positioning is another new approach that uses historical data to “predict” an application’s computational needs.

Trend #4 – Industrialization of systems development processes: While Trends 1-3 offer agility at the levels of infrastructure, architecture, and applications, Trend #4 tackles system development, which is notorious for cost overruns and outright failure. Today’s software development is further complicated by onshore-offshore teams working across distances and time zones. A more disciplined and industrialized approach to software development is emerging, by integrating tools tightly with team support, formalizing processes and automating. IT shops are adopting such agile methodologies to respond quickly to requirement changes.

Trend #5 – Convergence of data and process analytics: Today’s “business-intelligence” applications give woefully little insight into business performance. They are analytical silos operating on narrow information domains, generating reports that await management action.

True enterprise intelligence from data is on the horizon with sophisticated extract, transform and load capabilities, which are emerging in ERP systems to give access to ERP data.

Combined with Web service standards, they are allowing enterprises to extract sensor and Internet data.

Meanwhile, process-centric IT can reduce cycle time for translating business intelligence from data into action. As it matures, this trend will imbue enterprises with the ability to quickly adapt business processes according to patterns detected in the data.

Trend #6 – Fluid collaboration platforms: Trends 6-8 promote operational agility by enabling far-flung workers, both mobile and office-bound, to communicate and collaborate effectively. Today’s workers are overwhelmed by faxes, e-mail, voice mail and instant messages, which are uncoordinated and divorced from business processes. The new ecology of agility incorporates a fluid collaboration platform.

Trend #7 – Enterprise mobility: A growing mobile work force and adoption of mobile consumer applications are driving demand for mobile enterprise applications. Today, the best an enterprise employee can hope for is mobile e-mail. But two parallel advances will soon change that.

On the device end, more capabilities for devices, low-latency networks, and emerging technologies such as rich Internet applications (RIA) will support applications from data access to training-on-the-go. On the back end, process-centric IT will deliver enterprise processes across multiple devices. The new ecology will usher in standard mobile corporate applications and specialized applications for field workers such as sales, delivery and customer support.

Trend #8 – Innovation agility: Until recently, the Web was primarily a publishing medium for large organizations. But the latest generation of Web 2.0 innovation and technologies like Ajax, Ruby on the Rails, and Flash/Flex are enabling a new class of RIA and user-created situational applications. These may be powerful external drivers for innovation in the future.

The new IT ecology redefines the technology landscape, establishing enterprise agility as the next basis of competition. These eight trends will make achieving high agility through prudent use of technology easier than ever, and will ensure that agile organizations are unencumbered when they want to embrace innovation and change.

Kishore S. Swaminathan is the chief scientist at Accenture. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .