Measuring agility as a supporting tool for uncertainty governance in multinational enterprises: an IBM case study

Abstract

Large-scale human centred systems (enterprises) have had a rather rash time in dealing with the uncertain and turbulent business environments for over several decades or so. This has given way to enterprise performance and strategic success exerting a far wider effect than the enterprise itself. A majority of the strategic initiatives appear to fall short of desired expectations, which suggests that multinational enterprises are unable to derive the targeted long-term sustainable success from their planned and implemented strategies. This paper makes a sincere effort towards bridging that gap between the environment and the enterprise through aligning the crucial factors that form the backbone of the overall enterprise functioning. We believe that an agile enterprise has the best chance of coping with the uncertain business environment, and thereby underline the critical factors in determining the enterprise agility with respect to a specific case study.