[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Flip up Shades"][/caption]

For about a decade now everybody in IT talks about Agile, but hardly anybody else does. There is a somewhat similar concept of 'Lean' in other industries, but hardly anybody in a 'real' industry considers things like 'release early' a viable strategy. And that's a good thing. I don't want a second iteration car. "Ooops sorry, the story about braking is still in the backlog". I am confident that if those kind of companies would learn agile from the books, they'd need quite some time until they realize the fine difference between 'ship' and 'shippable'.

But maybe these companies won't learn it from the books, but from their tools. As said before companies will learn about social media, and to some extend it will invade  daily life and work at these companies. But if you start doing your documentation in a wiki, for everybody to see or spurt out your idea on a internal twitter account, then you are presenting stuff as potentially shippable. Not the car you will eventually build. But maybe the concept for a new feature.

Everybody will be able to judge the results, comment, provide feedback. And without realizing it big old companies will become just a little bit agile.