Managing Constant Change With Agile Marketing

Neil Perkin writes an interesting blog post about Agile Marketing and building the agile enterprise. I wanted to focus on one aspect of his post.

The IBM Global CEO Study indicated that CEO's felt bombarded by change, and are struggling to keep up, and that the pace of change has increased since 2006.

To me those numbers are not surprising. Think about all that's happened in just the last 5 years. The rise of social media in the main stream. 5 years ago society was just recognizing the power of blogs, and that was coming off the dot.com bust, 9/11 and the rise of Google and search engine marketing as a major force in media and advertising.

In the last five years we've seen the rise of social networks, first MySpace, then Facebook, and now Twitter, with Linkedin still growing. On the horizon we see Location Social Networks such as Foursquare,  reality, tablets beyond the iPad, and the promise of semantic technologies.

Change is constant, and even more fluid are communities, there's no guarantee Facebook will continue to capture the size of the market in years to come, and other technologies will appear that we don't even know about today, that will have a big impact. Look at what the iPad is doing to the publishing and network markets.

Those changes mean disruption for marketers, IT departments and developers. The existing systems don't describe what exists today, or will exist tomorrow in terms of marketing innovation. And to transform an organization to meet those changes requires not just a change in design and systems, but a change in thinking in how change is managed.

Spreading agile thinking across the enterprise gives companies the process to manage change, think agile development, think agile marketing, think agile social media.