Aligning it components to achieve agility in globally distributed system development

Software companies are developing global business strategies and support them with information systems to face the business challenges. There is growing interest in agility for successful global system development and to support diverse local business needs in the global scenario. Three components of agility in globally distributed system development (GDSD) projects are agile IT strategy, agile IT infrastructure and agile IT project management. Business agility is defined as a firm's capability to flexibility and rapidly respond to environmental variations by assembling and reconfiguring requisite assets, knowledge and business relationships. Information systems agility, on the other and represents the ability of information systems development and deployment methods to swiftly adapt to the changing requirements. Drawing from these concepts GDSD agility was conceptualized as the collective capability of globally distributed teams to rapidly develop and deploy systems.