MIT Sloan Management Review Article on What to Expect From Agile

What happens when a company whose roots go back over a century — a bank, no less — decides to adopt agile management methods developed in the software industry?

How is technology transforming the practice of management? As everyone knows, technological innovation enables changes in how we work, for example, helping people collaborate, access information more quickly, and make smarter decisions. Less obvious, but no less important, is the observation that technological innovation inspires new approaches to management. For example, the shift from mainframe computers to personal computers gave impetus to the empowerment trend of the 1980s, and the emergence of collaborative software tools shaped the knowledge management movement in the 1990s. In such cases, new technologies expand our capabilities and broaden our horizons, and it is this combination that enables management to evolve.