The rapid pace of change has been researched and documented by numerous comentators and this has been linked to the need for organizations which develop enterprise softtware to adopt Agile approaches. Blogger Matt Asay of MongoDB wrote about this in a recent post titled "Hey, Enterprise Developers! Get Agile Or Get Steamrollered" in which he talks about the need to "make each release a non-event".
He states that
Agile development is no longer an alternative way to develop software. With the pace of technology adoption accelerating at a frenetic pace, agile is increasingly the only way to develop software. That is, if you want to stay in busines
He quotes Forrester researcher Diego Lo Giudice who says
Within the modern applications era, regardless of whether new software applications are being developed and delivered for mobile, tablets, or the Web, the truly successful app-dev leaders will be those who focus on delivering constant value and incremental improvement to their business.
He talks about the need to be able to release frequently and how
Product stability comes from releasing code more frequently, not less. You want each release to be a non-event, not a major launch.
He references a recent Harvard Business Review post which looks at the increasing pace of change and shows how in many domains the rate of change has increased. In that article, Rita McGrath says
As you can see from the chart, innovations introduced more recently are being adopted more quickly. By analogy, firms with competitive advantages in those areas will need to move faster to capture those opportunities that present themselves.
His final argument for agile adoption is the uptake of Big Data and the need to experiment quickly
Big Data is new, and let's face it: most companies are likely going to fail as they start their projects. After all, it’s almost guaranteed that companies won’t know which data to capture, or how to leverage it, without trial and error. It therefore becomes critical to design for failure, with an agile approach that reduces the cost of failure, both in terms of time and money