At National Public Radio in Washington, CIO Bob Holstein continually encourages his staff to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them. "The primary impediment to agility is people being locked into a certain way of doing things," he says.

So in 2004, when Holstein came to NPR as its first CIO and vice president for IT after eight years at Capital One Corp. , one of the first things he did was change the way the IT staff interacts with NPR's IT users, particularly those in the newsroom, who he says are always frantically rushed and have no attention span for hashing out new system requirements with IT developers.

"Instead, we applied a development process akin to extreme programming. We would put something in front of the users [without their input], who would then tell us if we were pointed in the right direction," Holstein explains. "In the process, we came to understand their business processes much better and faster than if we had sat down in a traditional [joint application development] session." The result is a working prototype of a much more efficient system for tracking the assignment, production and archiving of news stories.

"Being able to adapt your communication style to the peculiarities of the business needs and certain users is absolutely critical to agility," Holstein says. "At NPR, we have some of the most brilliant folks in journalism in the newsroom, and the news is our bread and butter. That said, many of them tend to be computerphobic, yet they're at very senior levels of the organization. I just can't overemphasize the importance of adaptable communication skills to overall agility."

As IT leaders focus on the communication, business, financial and political skills they deem essential to agility, they also are actively de-emphasizing other skills, notably technical expertise.