What is the key to resilient evolution for the modern enterprise? The authors attempt to shed light on the question by discussing two insights: (1) responsive companies--and these are the ones that will dominate in the future--are powered by software, and (2) software development needs to close the control loop to measurably respond to the evolving needs of the enterprise and its clients.

The latter is a formulation of the well-known--though hardly well-articulated--holy grail of agile development, and the authors discuss a few of the key dimensions involved, for example, providing context to developers instead of sterile processes, or maintaining both data-driven, hierarchical decision making and fractal closed-loop real-time feedback systems for software development.

This article is directed to business readers seeking a holistic view of what a modern responsive enterprise is, rather than detailed case studies to clarify the concept or a road map to realize it.