The Agile Enterprise: Systems Engineering Agility at the Enterprise Level

Agility is all the rage. Across the landscape, businesses request agility as a deliverable, make claims that they are agile, and (some) go so far as to assert they can provide agility to other corporate entities outside of their own sphere of influence. The challenge before us as a Systems Engineering Community is that (Enterprise) Agility, although well documented throughout engineering literature since the early 1990s, is often misinterpreted. Agility means many things to many people, and heretofore, has been used as a synonym for rapid development and delivery. Although speed is a byproduct of agility, speed in and of itself is not robust enough to encompass all that agility provides an organization, its customers, and partners. The goals of this paper are to shed light on agility in context to businesses, especially with Enterprises engaged in Systems Engineering, and provide guidance as to how agility is best achieved regardless of the Enterprise’s business or mission objectives.