Re-Investigation of Agility Paradigm to Specific Reform of Agile Workforce and Agile Enterprise

Abstract

In today’s business world, agility is advocated as the fundamental characteristic for competitiveness. Despite variety of research studies has been performed on agility so far, most of them have focused on Agile Manufacturing (AM), and have not covered other aspects of enterprise. One of the basic pitfalls on achieving agility is the ignorance of workforce remarkable rule since the lack of agile workforce has been recognized as one of the main cause of failures on companies’ alignment with changes in the marketplace and technology. This paper aims at investigating about making enterprises agile by considering all aspects of organizations especially workforce. Firstly, the paper reviews the existing knowledge on agility in order to provide a clear concept of organizational agility, its attributes and enables. Secondarily, with a specific focus on agile workforce, most research studies on organizational flexibility and workforce adaptation is reinvestigated to identify the ideas, concepts, and indices which can be applied to agility paradigm in order to increase workforce agility. The results then are integrated and presented as the comprehensive framework of agile enterprise.

Keywords

• agile enterprise
• agile workforce
• agile attributes
• agile enablers