In the past six months, Scrum jobs on simplyhired.com have increased from 20,000 to 420,000. Despite this tsunami of Scrum job offerings, many of the traditional project leaders and senior IT staff I talk with are still resisting the inevitable and they fail to see the handwriting on the wall.It is now U.S. law that all DOD contracts are Agile. Maybe you will go to jail in the future for not being agile if you do work for the government. 
The Gartner 2012 advisory on application development to all IT senior management is:
- Business users are losing patience with old-school IT culture. Relationships are tense and resentful. Legacy systems and practices impede agility. Bottom line - GET AGILE
- Adopt a product perspective.
- Say goodbye to waterfall.
- Improve cross-competency collaboration.
- Launch a deep usability discipline.
- Start a technical debt management program.
The business user agile revolt is causing traditional IT budgets to be cut by 90% over the next decade as business users take control of the money.
The latest Gartner advisory shows what is likely to happen:
In two years, Gartner Inc. Research Vice President Brian Prentice predicts, the percentage of technology spending by the business -- outside of the control of IT -- will reach 35 percent.
Moreover, by the end of this decade Gartner is predicting businesses will control a whopping 90 percent of technology spend...
Consumerization and Cloud
The shift of technology spending from IT to the business units is driven by a number of factors, but according to Gartner, is mostly driven by:
- Consumerization – expectations by users and the business for their systems and applications to look and perform like consumer offerings versus the perceived limited solutions being offered by core IT.
- BYOD - users purchasing their own work tablets, laptops and other devices.
- Cloud Computing – where the business procure their own infrastructure, platforms and software as a service.
The role of IT is clearly evolving, where for technology system purchases like marketing automation, CRM, HR and even supply chain management, IT departments are brought in to support the integration of these systems into the enterprise systems, but IT is not leading the purchase project.
An indepth analysis of why management needs to move quickly to Agile is available in the new book Ken Schwaber and I have published recently - Software in 30 Days.
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