Great article. I've been an agile proponent long before the term was invented. As a one-man-gang developer in the user world for a large part of my early career I learned that giving the end users something useful, quickly and then continually evolving it was the most effective approach and the most value for the business... and one's career - you become a god to the users. It lives on in all the users called analysts that build useful (to their group) tools that get the job done. They use things like MS Access and don't necessarily follow standards or document - but they get the job done while the traditional IT world is scratching their butt. Even as a department head I made sure I had my "guy" that could make things happen quickly.

The trick for IT is to do the same thing on larger, team-sized projects with supportable tools, standards, etc. If you need an incentive to get on board, consider that agile done effectively is an almost ironclad defense against outsourcing or offshoring.