Contrary to what one might think, IT and the Business are not always perfectly integrated. Sometimes, there is a clear distinction between ‘Us, IT’ and ‘Them, the Business’, when in fact these two should never be separated. Here’s why.

Keeping pace with the fast-moving digital world whilst facing increasing customer demands has never been more challenging than today. Enterprise  agility  is the key to meet market pressures, ensure faster response to change, reduce costs, and stay afloat of the competition. The Times has dedicated its supplement from September 13th to Enterprise Agility, in collaboration with Raconteur.

Radtac collaborated with journalist Cath Everett to investigate the challenges faced by organisations, and how an Agile approach focusing on people and mindset change would benefit the business in overcoming those challenges.

William Hill - a name that all of us are familiar with, if not from participating in their gaming and leisure offering, then at least from the high visibility that William Hill secured themselves. One of the world’s leading betting and gaming companies, William Hill would not have gotten to where they are today without a high focus on technology and its continuous improvement.

A fair number of years ago, in 2007, William Hill was working on upgrading their website through a NextGen technology programme, using their in-house people. Despite the internal effort, the failure of the programme to produce desired results has led to the NextGen programme being shut down, leading to a £26 million write-off.

The objective of the programme had been to move the company from traditional legacy systems onto a modern IT infrastructure, allowing the company to become more competitive by being more UI and UX focused. William Hill wanted to offer new and improved services, and to respond to customer needs. While the target was ambitious, the project failed on delivering on its objectives.

January is the month where people and businesses look back and do an assessment of the year that has just passed. It’s also a good time to set goals and paths to follow in the year ahead. This Insight Thursday post focuses on conclusions drawn from 2015 and challenges for the year ahead around Agile and Business Transformation.

Agile was the norm in 2015

Christina Mulligan from SD Times concludes how Agile keeps picking up with many organisations, following on its ascending adoption trend. 2015 is said to have been “the year they [software development companies] all finally started to understand and see the benefits”.

A white paper written by Peter Measey, CEO of Radtac, for BCS Enterprise, which discusses the integration of Agile with ITIL® (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

Read the white paper here

Preview

Agile and ITIL® -  And how they integrate

Within the world of method frameworks it is very easy to become polarised on one specific framework and become a ‘fundamentalist’ on that one single method. Method fundamentalism leads to people focusing on why all other method frameworks are wrong and theirs is right, rather than a focus on how integrated method frameworks can enable excellent delivery (which is the whole point of having them). Most method frameworks have something to offer and, via inspection and adaption, they can normally co-exist.

This white paper discusses the integration of agile with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).