Quantifying Busing Agility

While talking about SOA, we routinely make a claim that agile business needs agile IT and SOA is required for having agile IT. But then sometimes the questions comes, how do you determine whether the business is agile or not? I have got one possible answer for this question from the book titled “Enterprise Architecture as Strategy”.

“While there can be many ways, one indicator of agility is a company’s percentage of revenue generated from new products. MIT research on 147 companies found that, from 1998 to 2002, on average, 24% of a company’s sales were from new products introduced in the prior three years. But this percentage varied greatly from company to company - even between those in the same industry. For example, in manufacturing the average was 24%. However, a third of companies achieved 50% of sales from new products. These more-agile companies also had a high percentage of their core business processes digitized.”