How a business structures itself internally can have a huge impact on workflow and culture—both across individual teams and the company as a whole.

Companies need to be fast, focused, and adaptable to remain competitive in a world where customers’ needs are constantly changing. A wide variety of stakeholders have to work together across an organization to align the product or service with customer needs and company goals.

A new model of work must be adopted to meet this challenge—and with that challenge comes a major opportunity for IT leaders to demonstrate business leadership far and wide across their organizations.

Agile has been a prominent development practice for the past 15 years in technology, but the basic tenets of agile can be a cross-company organizing principle to help teams in any function be more efficient and, well, agile. According to Salesforce’s second annual “State of IT” report, 75 percent of tech leaders say IT is currently in the midst of the biggest historical shift of its role, becoming more deeply involved in the business and playing a critical role in processes. Since technology leaders already have vast expertise with agile, they’re well positioned to be change agents for forward-thinking companies by encouraging widespread adoption of the philosophy.

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