There are several obstacles to agility in the corporate context, e.g., risk-averse cultures, organizational silos, bureaucratic layers, workforce passivity, traditional mindsets, a lack of strongly supportive top management. If these issues are not fully understood and properly addressed, they can lead to major disappointments when implementing agile practices on the corporate level.

Corporate agility can successfully be enhanced by organizational learning that develops corporate agility capabilities in an appropriate sequence. These capabilities ensure the link between Digital Transformation and Agile Transformation; reference to the enterprise strategy; integration of the executive management level; consistent design of value streams; organizational change management; bridging the gap between business and IT. This also and especially applies to SAFe® implementations. Companies that take this into account make SAFe® even more successful.

Prof. Dr. Peter Rohner,
Adjunct Professor University of St. Gallen & Chairman of the Board of Directors of Business Engineering Group (BEG)

Peter Rohner has been an entrepreneur since 1989 and has founded and managed several IT companies. Over the years, the purpose of these companies has been oriented towards the topics and customer needs of the respective period (operation of computer centres, software development for mainframe and mini-computers, system integration for client/server computing, security for networks, management of large projects, consulting for business/IT alignment).

Parallel to being an entrepreneur, he completed his PhD and habilitation at the University of St.Gallen (HSG). He is teaching as professor in the master’s programme for Business Innovation and doing research as Vice Director of the Institute for Information Systems and Digital Business (IWI-HSG). he very much enjoys the combination of business practice and science. He has also learned a lot through his work on economic policy committees (including the board of the Thurgau Chamber of Industry and Commerce) and in leadership roles in the Swiss Army.