For several years, businesses and organizations have faced an increasingly volatile environment, marked with challenges such as increased competition, globalized markets, and individualized customer requirements. These challenges are accompanied by many changes in every organizational field. As a response, different concepts have emerged that should enable organizations to master these challenges. Agility is the most recent, but others like flexibility and leanness are mentioned often, too. Many research activities concerning agility and its related concepts have been conducted in the meantime. However, there currently exists no common understanding of what constitutes agility. This makes it difficult for both researcher and practitioner audiences to build upon the insights obtained thus far. On the one hand, researchers are missing a well-founded basis to develop the topic further, while on the other hand, practitioners cannot easily uncover what parts of their organizations have to be changed and in what respect they have to be changed to respond to new market challenges. This is of particular interest for organizations in the software and information technology (IT) service industry. With the appearance of agile software developing methodologies in the early 2000s, or in a broader sense agile values and principles, the advantages of these new approaches became visible. However, it turned out to be difficult to transfer the experienced benefits beyond the team level, though this step is necessary so that the whole organization can benefit from agility. Hence, the report presented here is part of a research project aimed at identifying the structure and components of an agile organization within the software and IT service industry. To fulfill this aim, a survey from a comprehensive organizational perspective has been carried out that was based on a systematic comparison of available agility frameworks. The purpose of this publication is to give an initial comprehensive overview over the collected data. Together with a comprehensive literature review conducted prior to this study, it answers the research questions: "What are potential components of an agile organization?" and "To what extent are these components reflected by the software and IT service industry?"

For several years, businesses and organizations have faced an increasingly volatile environment, marked with challenges such as increased competition, globalized markets, and individualized customer requirements. These challenges are accompanied by many changes in every organizational field. As a response, different concepts have emerged that should enable organizations to master these challenges. Agility is the most recent, but others like flexibility and leanness are mentioned often, too. Many research activities concerning agility and its related concepts have been conducted in the meantime. However, there currently exists no common understanding of what constitutes agility. This makes it difficult for both researcher and practitioner audiences to build upon the insights obtained thus far. On the one hand, researchers are missing a well-founded basis to develop the topic further, while on the other hand, practitioners cannot easily uncover what parts of their organizations have to be changed and in what respect they have to be changed to respond to new market challenges. This is of particular interest for organizations in the software and information technology (IT) service industry. With the appearance of agile software developing methodologies in the early 2000s, or in a broader sense agile values and principles, the advantages of these new approaches became visible. However, it turned out to be difficult to transfer the experienced benefits beyond the team level, though this step is necessary so that the whole organization can benefit from agility. Hence, the report presented here is part of a research project aimed at identifying the structure and components of an agile organization within the software and IT service industry. To fulfill this aim, a survey from a comprehensive organizational perspective has been carried out that was based on a systematic comparison of available agility frameworks. The purpose of this publication is to give an initial comprehensive overview over the collected data. Together with a comprehensive literature review conducted prior to this study, it answers the research questions: 'What are potential components of an agile organization?' and 'To what extent are these components reflected by the software and IT service industry?