3 Agile at Work Taking the lead from the digital natives they increasingly compete against, two industries have been at the forefront of adopting agile practices: retail and financial services. In their article ‘How Retail CEOs Can Drive Agile to Grow Their Business’, Rajashree R. and Pratik Pal of TCS explain how several large retailers have used agile approaches to bring innovative business models, business processes, and customer offerings to market faster. They show why taking half-measures with agile don’t go far enough in keeping retailers competitive. Because money essentially is a product that can be fully digital, banks and financial services firms have been under $ attack for years from digitally savvy startups that have made $ $ mortgage and auto loans faster, payments and payment processing easier, and stock trades cheaper. In their article ‘Fending Off the FinTechs: How Agile Financial Services Firms are Transforming Their Businesses’, TCS consultants RamanaMurthy Magapu and Sathish Sankaranarayanan explain how a number of established financial institutions have used agile approaches to strike back successfully. They also explain how to get past the barriers that hold financial services firms from embracing agile practices. Finally, in our last article ‘Why Your Agile Team is Better Off Dispersed: The Case for Location-Independent Agile’, I explain why large companies around the world now need to significantly scale up their agile approaches to process improvement, product and service development, and business model innovation. I show why scaling up agile requires making it truly location-independent. 9