A measure of agility as the complexity of the enterprise system

Agility is the ability of an organization to adapt to change and also to seize opportunities that become available due to change. While there has been much work and discussion of what agility is and how firms can become agile there is little work at measuring the agility of a firm. Measurement is necessary for the strategic planning of determining how much agility an organization currently posses, determining how much is needed, and then for assessing the gap and formulating a strategy for closing any perceived weaknesses. The measurement of agility as defined is difficult to measure since it must be measured in the context of a change. Consequently, most current agility measurement approaches are backward looking. A different and novel approach is to use complexity as a surrogate measure for agility. The hypothesis supporting this substitution is that a less complex enterprise in terms of systems and processes is easier to change and consequently more agile. To test this idea a model and measurement approach for measuring complexity is presented. The model uses Petri Nets to find the state space probabilities needed for the complexity measure. The contribution of this research is the quantification of complexity at the business process level and description of a method for conducting this measure. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.