While new technologies and analytic techniques promise increases in business agility, most implementation examples describe greenfield projects. Organizations don't have the luxury of taking a greenfield approach because existing systems constrain their choices and continue to support core processes.

Historically, systems were designed to focus on automating tasks or providing automated assistance to doing tasks. Now systems are being asked to be neutral to business logic so that this logic can be changed with as little implication to the IT implementation as possible. This radical shift in paradigms involves a complex combination of technology, business, and organizational change.

These challenges are indeed complex and there is no silver bullet even in a green-field scenario. Finding a path given the constraints of existing implementations is even more complex, but there are proven strategies and tools that can be used to address these issues.

Enterprise Agility focuses on helping organizations navigate the range of efforts required to succeed with these efforts by bringing a focused approach and framework to the problem developed over years of involvement in these kinds of projects. We address three aspects of making this kind of transition:

• How to find the business logic in the existing implementation
• How to structure the business logic in the new implementation to gain more agility and not just end up with a new IT-centric solution
• How to help guide the organizational changes that are necessary to support the changes that accompany this kind of effort

The reality is that organizations have business knowledge embedded within their existing automation systems that they cannot guarantee is recoverable from any other source. Enterprise Agility's framework is supported by a business logic approach that guides the process of extracting business logic from these existing systems. But just extracting this logic from these existing systems isn't enough. The logic in those systems typically is neither expressed in business terms nor is it free of artificial technology artifacts. What is required is that this business logic be reformulated in business terms.

Enterprise Agility's framework addresses the formulation of business level knowledge and behavior via business rules, business workflow, business events and business entities. This approach produces a business level specification that is technology neutral but is complete enough to behave as a true business level simulation of the business behavior at a detailed level.

Mentoring for Sustained Capability within your Organization

But, business agility engineering can't be achieved purely by examining existing processes and their automation support and reengineering them into new automation solutions. In order to gain the desired agility organizations also need to be able to get their business domain experts closer to the implementation of business change to reduce the number of retranslations and handoffs between a business specification of what is needed and the automation solutions support of it.

Enterprise Agility provides a structured approach to mentoring and tailored training to help organizations build up these abilities. The mentoring approach focuses on bringing in skilled practitioners to work alongside organizations' staff to help lead by example and coach key personnel. Our education offerings supplement this mentoring by helping to build understanding of key concepts and approaches to broader groups within organizations. Taken together this approach of building both a cadre of specialists and a broader awareness is essential to the institutionalization of agile business processes.

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