In March, Fujitsu DTS Sr. Director Kartik Ravel shared Fujitsu's work in the areas of strategy execution, business architecture and benefits realization with 50+ working professionals in the Penn State graduate class.

His presentation, Enabling Agility with Business Architecture, emphasized that business agility at market speed is paramount to leapfrogging the competition.

Digital benefits–did your company just spend millions of dollars on a multiyear digital implmentation and the promised pot of gold seems to be elusive? Kartik Ravel has led and advised on many business and IT transformations across small and large ogranizations, he often was surprised to see the limited progress in benefits realization.

Recently, a noticeable trend has arisen where executives are questioning the value of their digital investments. They have cause for concern as the promises of digital benefits are often not being fully realized. However, not all organizations are failing short; top performing companies are harvesting significant business benefits through a value-led transformation approach.

Public and private organizations are all seeking to reduce their system development cost. To that end, they are trying to tackle different approaches to eliminate their inefficient practices that result in unnecessary high costs. One of them is the propensity of a number of solution architects to work and refine solution design for weeks if not months before delivering value to the client : the Big Design Up Front (BDUF) often finds itself in the dock.

I was working with a Fujitsu/client project team recently as they were refining their approach to developing a replacement application. My role was to help everybody appreciate what was available in Macroscope that might be useful to them, especially regarding some of the bigger challenges in this particular project.

There were differences of opinion within the client team members about how much the approach should be driven by architectures, estimates and plans vs. a highly Agile approach. We had a good idea of the right balance ourselves, but of course needed client buy-in.

Just what is “Agile”

There have of course been many great successes from taking a “big A” approach. The “sweet spot” scenarios involve the need for innovation and rapid creativity, where at the start there is an incomplete vision of the end product. (There have been failures too, but we won’t talk about those here.)

Now the astute Agile practitioner will have caught my deliberate error above. There is no such thing as a “by-the-book big A” approach. There are many books! When one reads about analysis of Agile use, it is usually in the form of “which of these .. are people using?”. Different people are using different aspects of Agile. And sometimes there are great debates between thought leaders about the superiority of some aspects over others – but somehow “it’s all Agile”.