The Manifesto

Edition editorial and overview

Is Agile helping our clients lose the path to innovation?

Let us revisit our ability to create and extract value from the client ecosystem. Historically, system integrator rewards come from assuming the risks of technological uncertainty and the capacity to train and retain scarce talent.

While the traditional IT services approach focuses on anticipating problems and finding systemic, structural and replicable solutions, Agile internalizes the knowledge by merging client and supplier roles. As a result, the integrator's creativity and IPR tend to devalue.

How do we create value for our company beyond the value created for our clients?

A solution such as Order Management is an example of creating innovative technological assets centred on technology that anticipated sophisticated integration needs over several years.

However, these knowledge assets lose their strength when they start to be served incrementally through Agile, leading to the progressive erosion of suppliers' exclusivity and perceived value. Even our senior people can easily fall into the illusion that we are creating value for ourselves, serving just the client's agenda at their pace of innovation.  

Agile's manifesto always sounds good and doesn't raise alarms. As a result, the Client Business leaders depend less on the integrators' initiative to create disruption. Many Clients believe they can quickly adopt innovative technologies with lower risks.

The question is how to keep strategic control as integrators since Agile is here to stay. What is the role of a Systems Integration services company?

Ultimately, clients will require an excellent understanding of what technology disruption serves their Business strategy to rely on an IT systems integrator as their preferred trusted advisor.

When delivering innovation, the technology agenda needs to be served in a phased manner without compromising honesty and transparency as attributes of Agile. This implies awareness from all decision-making roles involved in agile projects (delivery executives, scrum masters, data engineers, data scientists, developers, architects, business analysts or UX experts).

All stakeholders should know that capturing value for us will depend on how we lead disruption, operating with an agile mindset.

What to look for in this edition?

This edition of CALL - dedicated to Agility - presented an opportunity to revamp our internal newsletter by featuring content that highlights our team, offers, ongoing projects, among other things. The following articles can be found in this edition:

• New at Celfocus – welcoming colleagues who just joined our team
• What we’ve been up to – an overview of past and future initiatives that took place between editions
• Promotions 2023 – celebrating those who have stepped into new roles & responsibilities
• Our Agility Journey - from a client need into a culture 
• When Strategy becomes Agile - a look into Celfocus' Strategic Agile Routines
• Kanban | Agile is not only Scrum - an internal story about a project's journey to agile from three different perspectives
• & so much more - be inspired and explore external content dedicated to this edition's topic - agility