Through the Computerworlds whitepaper repository, i came across this whitepaper by IDG, titled Thinking Outside the Box: Architecting for Agility.

Here is a summary/description of the whitepaper: A plethora of issues are pressing organizations to be more nimble than ever before to address shifting market demands and opportunities. Today's enterprises are faced with many of the same traditional forces as enterprises past, but what has changed more dramatically in recent years has been the volume, complexity, and volatility of external influences and stakeholders. These forces need to be more readily accommodated in an integrated fashion.

Below are some excerpts from the whitepaper:

Among the many environmental drivers and challenges voiced by top business executives in a recent IDC study, the most pervasive concerns are the growing maturity of and increasing level of expectations from their respective clientele. Thus, having a comprehensive view of one's customer-related information and all the potential customer touch points is critical. Tight fiscal constraints and sweeping regulatory demands are also part of the grand mix of issues most mentioned as enterprises face escalating pressures to more adeptly manage their overall risk profiles, performance targets, and margins.

Another consideration as the overall economy evolves to be more services-based is that the people factor within business processes becomes even more critical to harness and optimize. A significant amount of such activity is still highly manual, inefficient, and unpredictable. Some rudimentary steps have been made to arm knowledge workers with access to pertinent and more timely information that has been traditionally locked up in transactional systems. A next step will be to gain more focused visibility within the context of not only specific roles, but per explicit circumstances and overall enterprise processes and policies.

Creating a well-constructed infrastructure that can flexibly support a multitude of applications, combined with an overall systems and application architecture that is modular, model-based, interoperable, and extensible is a cornerstone of enterprise agility. The value of this one-two punch can be realized in many ways, such as, but not limited to:
- Providing needed levels of consistency and integrity across processes and information
- Leveraging core services to gain rapid time to market, focusing new efforts on what is truly different and innovative
- Providing more comprehensive and integrated visibility, oversight and control, and change management across varied systems and processes
- Providing levels of self-service to multiple stakeholders in a governed capacity, adhering to central and local policies
- Partitioning system resources for best utilization, whether to accommodate goals of prioritization or efficiency

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