Agile Systems Integrators: Plausible Or Paradoxical?

Agile methods have become popular because, on average, they produce better outcomes. Agile's focus on learning by execution and a condensed set of engineering practices increases the cadence of delivery when businesses need to supply innovative ideas in unknown business areas. However, the landscape of modern development organizations is a combination of in-house development resources and external systems integrators (SIs) that are both on and offshore. Forrester's research has found that SIs are increasingly looking to Agile methods to better partner with their customers and deliver innovative software. But the overall adoption of Agile within SIs is uneven: Specialist vendors such as Ci&T, emergn, and ThoughtWorks use Agile methods in the majority of their development projects, while large, generalist SIs are using Agile methods more sparingly. The differences among adoption rates are not solely the result of each individual SI's desire to be more Agile but are actually driven by the client's ability to adopt Agile practices in the context of the problems it has hired the SI to work on. Application development professionals need to change their working practices to work with their SI in an Agile way. These changes will not only enable the adoption of Agile processes but will also deliver improved innovation and increased business value.