Agile development aligns business & IT

An interesting podcast from Scott Hanselman interviewing Owen Rogers. Scott does a consistently fantastic job with his interviews. (A transcript is available if you prefer to read.)

The discussion is about continuous integration and monitoring. But it touches on the concept of continuous integration as "the thin edge of the wedge" of agile adoption in an organization. That is, setting up continuous integration can have a viral quality that begins to inject more agile behavior into the organization.

That's an interesting concept in and of itself. But then the discussion also put forth the notion that agile development aligns IT more closely with the business. This is not an idea I recall hearing explicitly stated before. Thinking about how agile works, this seems patently obvious, of course. But agile is generally presented as an IT-driven effort, primarily for the benefit of IT.

This concept of agile being a mechanism by which to effect business/IT alignment is a good one to keep in your back pocket and could be a useful argument for enterprise architects to help sell agile to the business.

Photo: autumn wedges
by mezone