"There's some misconception about agility. It's not just about changing rapidly," says Earl Monsour, director of strategic information technologies for the Maricopa County Community College District in Tempe, Ariz. "It's about responding quickly and appropriately, which requires having a long-range plan in place at all times. With a plan, you can make adjustments as technology changes and business opportunities arise, rather than reinventing the wheel each time change occurs."

Maricopa's long-range plan to overhaul its core WAN, which supports the district's 10 colleges, is a prime example. For the past two years, Monsour continually talked about the need for a major network upgrade and the plan for making that happen. During that time, the college district's IT organization successfully implemented several network enhancements, including a network load-balancing system and two storage-area networks. These projects worked to boost executive confidence in the larger network overhaul proposal, and when it came time to formally request the budget to perform the overhaul, "we had approval for that major investment within a month," Monsour says. "The reason is because we had planned and communicated our plan so much beforehand. The plan constantly has to be communicated. It just can't sit on the shelf."

Premier 100 honoree and Lafayette Consolidated Government CIO Keith Thibodeaux firmly believes that by identifying and standardizing certain technology and business process frameworks, Lafayette is better able to collaborate with other governmental and nongovernmental entities, which is critical to its own organizational agility. Frameworks take into consideration systems and organizational interdependencies, required IT and business skills, and the long-term costs and ROI of IT.

Using the framework approach, Lafayette Consolidated Government is working with five universities in the state and the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative to create its own research network that will support the US$20 million Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise Center .

The center's 3-D technology is used by the oil and gas industry to model seismic data and reservoirs. But for most of the region's small and medium-size independent oil and gas companies, the technology was out of financial reach. So Lafayette's Economic Development Authority stepped in, along with Silicon Graphics Inc., to create an immersive visualization facility.