It’s popular to coin new phrases these days, so here is one from truly yours. The lowest common denominator agility signifies the total agility of an enterprise and it means your enterprise is only as agile as its least agile unit.

Although highly effective agile teams, often supported by maverick managers, have delivered significant results in specific areas of efficiency and flexibility, it remains a fact that a business can be only as agile as the IT systems that support it.

Without looking into enterprise agility, small software teams often fail to impact the overall enterprise agility by concentrating on a narrow deliverable or a small module of the overall enterprise. Current agile literature promotes small teams, which is understandable. A small team is manageable and can deliver real results really quickly. What’s missing is uber-project management with the Enterprise in mind.

Lately, successes in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) have enabled business agility by bringing structured approach to model, assemble, deploy and manage key services in the enterprise. It’s probably the “architecture” in SOA which makes some in the industry confuse SOA for technical features or geek-sensation. Some even suggest that it’s nothing but the good old web services repackaged in glossy paper. I disagree. SOA is a largely business term and its designed to enable enterprise agility by making the business decision makers realize what technical folks have been harnessing for years: reuse, transparency, interface decoupling, flexibility.

SOA has the potential to make disperate business units and IT functions work better together; reuse and consolidate software and maintenance and generally make changing services easier and faster and thus it can increase the lowest common denominator agility of your enterprise.

Next time: What is Agile SOA?