If a company wants to be fast on its feet, transform end-to-end customer experiences, and continuously outpace competitors, it needs more than lots of agile teams. A truly agile enterprise requires that the company's top officers--most, if not all, of the C-suite--embrace agile principles, too. In this article the authors describe how such an agile leadership team functions, how it differs from the conventional corporate-style executive committee and from other agile teams, and what agile means for senior executives' day-to-day work lives. The job of a conventional agile team is to create innovative solutions to a problem--be it the need for a new product or service, a better business process, or an advanced technology to support new offerings. The job of an agile leadership team is to strike the right balance between standardizing operations and pursuing innovation. Most agile team members dedicate virtually all of their time to their agile roles, but that's not possible for executives. They have to simultaneously build and run the agile enterprise operating system, oversee business units and functions, serve as mentors and decision makers, and handle the crises of the moment.

Many companies still overlook the virtues of electronic invoice and payment systems: Some 70% of U.S. business-to-business transactions involve paper invoices and checks, and managing them costs about $116 billion a year. Electronic systems can help cut accounts payable overhead by more than 50%--but suppliers need to be converted quickly.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. For many years now, companies seeking to deliver higher business performance by harnessing IT have focused on alignment--the degree to which the IT group understands the priorities of the business. In practical terms, that means there must be shared ownership and shared governance of IT projects. However, the authors contend that their research reveals a troubling pattern: Even at companies that were focused on alignment, business performance dependent on IT sometimes went sideways, or even declined. That's because underperforming capabilities are often rooted not just in misalignment but in the complexity of systems, applications, and other infrastructure. The complexity doesn't magically disappear just because an IT organization learns to focus on aligned projects rather than less aligned ones. On the contrary, the authors say, in some situations it can actually get worse. Costs rise, delays mount, and the fragmentation makes it difficult for managers to coordinate across business units. The research also showed that almost three-quarters of respondents are mired in the "maintenance zone." IT at these companies is generally underperforming, undervalued, and kept largely separate from a company's core business functions. Corporate management budgets the amounts necessary to keep the systems running, but IT doesn't offer enough added value to the business and often isn't expected to. Drawing on the experiences of Charles Schwab & Co., Selective Insurance Group, De Beers, First Data Corp. and National City, among others, the authors identify a group of best practices that constitute "IT-enabled growth."