Toward Enabling IS Agility with Initiatives

Abstract

The uncertain, unpredictable and ever-changing conditions of the information system (IS) enterprise environment require adaptive and holistic approaches from the IS engineering methods. As an answer, the agile paradigm has emerged in the business as well as in the software and IS development. In this context, we consider the idea that initiatives could play a prominent role in the IS evolution steering, particularly to the enterprise IS agility. IS evolution initiatives should be considered as opportunities for an IS to sustainably evolve, to support the enterprise transversal and value-creating activities and to be part of the IS steering methods. In this paper, we define the notion of initiative and propose an approach based on a set of interrelated IS steering meta-models and method components where initiatives play the role of agility enablers.