1 The Essence of Agile In ‘Embracing Agility Means Agility by the Business, for the Business,’ Nidhi Srivastava of TCS discusses why big companies must embrace agile practices when they build new businesses, design new business processes, and develop the systems that support them. As she explains, a big reason is that ‘digital natives’ (companies born on the Internet like Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb and Amazon) have inherent advantages over older companies. Established companies need to get agile quickly to compete. However, Srivastava also shows why they shouldn’t attempt to make every part of their organization agile all at the same time. Instead, they need to phase in agile approaches carefully. The next article in this section explains how in the early days of agile software development, the idea was to bring business people and software developers into the same room. Today, that’s a quaint notion. Agile teams in many enterprises stretch across time zones. It’s now unrealistic to expect all agile team members to sit side by side. In their article ‘How to Make Location-Independent Agile Work’, K. Subramanian and Mohammed Musthafa S. explain how to make dispersed agile team members work as one. 6