Most products and services are new and innovative for only a short while. Soon they become commodities, because they get copied and are offered at lower prices. Profit margins drop when that happens.

This means that a lot of profitable opportunities are short term. So if a company can't respond quickly, it will have a hard time making money. And since most business operations can't function without appropriate technology, IT agility becomes a requirement in our global economy.

What is IT agility? It's the mixture of art and engineering that delivers robust 80 percent solutions fast enough to capitalize on opportunities before profit margins drop. Let's take a look at what this means.

First of all, agility means delivering robust systems, not systems that were thrown together with poorly written code. Agile systems are stable systems that do what they do reliably.

Agile systems are always 80 percent solutions because they need to be delivered quickly. To do this, developers limit scope and focus on delivering only the most important features in any situation -- the ones 80 percent of the users need. Systems that try to address all the issues fall into the trap of ever-expanding requirements and endless scope creep.