MAY 201919 Digital business is creating a new world that old world organisations must learn to live in. Many of those successful in the old world for decades or even centuries are unfit to compete in today's business environment. To disrupt, lead and survive, established organisations must be able to operate and adapt as swiftly as external conditions shift and internal aspirations swing. The pioneers are embarking on a third wave of enterprise agile transformation. Third-wavers draw on experience from four decades of change during the rise of the digital era. They've learnt from a first wave of business productivity improvement practices applied late last century, such as Lean Six Sigma and business process engineering. They've taken lessons from a second wave of agile principles and practices adopted by IT early this century. Third wavers confidently experiment to reform their trinity of organisational assets: culture, technology and data. They're now evolving from old world enterprises into new world, resilient, enterprise agile digital businesses. BNP Paribas Fortis (BNPPF), the leading bank in Belgium, is one such pioneer. I had the good fortune of interviewing the bank's senior executives. A fintech or digital native bank and a traditional bank like BNPPF differ in that the former grew up fast in a distributed, connected, constantly experimenting, digital world; while the latter inherited a business framework optimized for historical conditions.While it might be possible to undergo digital evolution, BNPFF decided that an enterprise "revolution" from the inside-out may be a more rational and effective response to new, irrational, external business conditions. The CEO and board embarked on a path to change in 2016 in response to market signals. The CEO declared: "This is not an IT story, it's a bank story."Champion digital business ambitionLeadership of successful enterprise agile transformation sits squarely with the CEO. They're the champion of the enterprise agile vision, driven by both fear and hope, and by the unpredictable threats and extraordinary opportunities of the digital business era. Their clear digital business ambition is not just to optimise, but to transform their organisation. Third-wave CEO and trans-formation leaders commonly exhibit a strong bias for action, getting things done in agile terms to enact change quickly and iteratively, learning and adapting as they go. The CEO needs resilience and confidence to ride out a long-term, multifaceted set of radical interventions that will disrupt the organisation from within. They also require ca-pable leaders who are passion-ate about the future vision and have the perseverance to see the transformation through to completion, rallying against the naysayers. THE THIRD WAVE OF ENTERPRISE AGILITYMAKING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WORK IN ESTABLISHED ORGANISATIONSBY JENNY BERESFORD, SENIOR RESEARCH DIRECTOR, GARTNERJenny BeresfordCXO NSIGHTS
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