What are Agile Digital Services and Why Do You Need Them?

What are agile digital services?

Agile digital services are services built to flag risk before it becomes an incident, not to explain the incident after it happens. The value isn't speed of delivery. It's the early warning nobody else is giving you.

The warning that was written down before the failure

While working with IRI on the Finacle platform, I was inside a multi-vendor datacenter environment. Multiple vendors, multiple systems, one shared infrastructure. I saw the risk in how those systems depended on each other and put a formal warning on record before anything failed.

Most people in that position stay quiet. Flagging a risk that hasn't happened yet is uncomfortable. Nobody wants to be the one who slows things down over a problem that might not occur.

I wrote it down anyway. That's what agile looks like from the inside. Not fast reaction. A documented call made ahead of the event, while it was still possible to act on it.

The brutal truth about most "agile" digital services

Most agencies selling agile digital services are selling speed: fast turnaround, quick iterations, rapid deployment. Speed after a problem starts is not the same as a warning before it starts. One is damage control with a nicer name. The other is agility.

Why you need agile digital services built this way

1. Someone has to be watching the dependencies between your systems, not just the systems themselves.
2. Warnings need to be written down, not just mentioned in a meeting. A record is what makes a warning actionable later.
3. The person raising the flag needs enough standing to be heard, even when the warning is inconvenient.
4. Fixes should happen on the warning, not on the outage.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a digital service "agile" instead of just fast?
Speed after a problem is reaction. An agile service identifies the risk and documents it before the problem occurs.

Do I need agile digital services if my systems already work?
Systems that work today are often carrying an undocumented risk that hasn't surfaced yet, especially in multi-vendor environments where one system's change affects another.

How do I know if my current provider is agile or just reactive?
Ask whether they've ever put a written warning on record before an incident happened, not just a fix after one did.

Get the warning before the outage.

M.A.P. (Maverick Advantage Platform) exists to help executives see the risk in their own market early and put their name on the record around it, the same discipline that flagged a datacenter risk before it became an outage.

Read more in what is an agile workflow and the agile flow.

M.A.D. Designs Your Brand. M.A.P. Makes You Known For It.

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