Boost your digitalization: Agile for real

Every company I meet claims that they’re agile. When I push a little bit and ask for details, typically the conclusion is that this is only true at the team level. The rest of the organization is stuck in traditional, slow cycles. The defense that I get is that the company is fast enough in responding to changing customer needs as they would have gone out of business otherwise.

To me, this is a typical case of “what got us here won’t get us there.” When reflecting on how we deliver value to customers, we can see a continuous acceleration of value delivery cycles. Initially, most companies deliver value through product generations. Every few years, the next version of the product comes out and people update from the previous version to the new one. Especially in software, but also for other technologies, the yearly update has become the norm in several industries, especially in IT. Now, we’re moving towards DevOps, DataOps and MLOps and we deliver value every 2-4 weeks.

Of course, the speed-up of value delivery won’t stop there. Especially in the online world, techniques such as A/B testing are used to even more quickly deliver value to customers. And, as a next step, some companies (and researchers such as in my group) are experimenting with techniques like reinforcement learning where systems fully autonomously experiment with their own behavior to optimize their performance.