Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

Measuring Information Systems Agility: Construct Definition and Scale Development

Organizational agility has been a touted by both researchers and practitioners as a key success factor in navigating turbulent business environments. With a heavy reliance on computer systems by many organizations, information systems agility has become an important contributor to organizational agility. The purpose of this paper is to investigate previous attempts at defining the IS agility construct and synthesize the previous work into a single, comprehensive definition of IS agility. With a complete definition of IS agility compiled, steps will be outlined for developing a reliable scale for measuring IS agility within organizations

IT Project Selection in an Agile Organisation

Organisations face a persistent challenge in achieving sustained competitive advantage in the rapidly changing business landscape. Organisational agility (OA), enabled by information technology (IT), offers hope. However, organisations that pursue agility encounter incompatibility with IT project selection (ITPS), where projects are selected and funded before implementation. Existing literature highlights the dual capability of ITPS to enable and disable agility, underscoring its continued importance for agile organisations. To tackle the incompatibility between ITPS and OA, this study presents a case study conducted at Infrastructure Co, an agile organisation that actively undertakes ITPS. Findings show the need for a redesign of traditional ITPS governance to facilitate agility. Infrastructure Co achieved this by delegating and decentralising ITPS processes and decisions away from the enterprise-project-management-office into projects. This study contributes by presenting revelatory empirical findings, addressing this important new research question

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE RENEWAL OF BUSINESS MODELS

With the advent of the information age, shrinking product lifecycles and intense competition, organizations continuously seek to renew their business models to exploit new market opportunities. Existing literature suggests that advances in IT and the rise of corporate-wide IT platforms facilitate the use of IT resources across the organization and can drive the evolution of business models. However, we still know little about the role of IT in enabling successful business models. This study investigates the relationship between corporate IT platforms and business model evolution. We examine the case of DHL Express to understand how its efforts to build a corporate IT platform influenced the company’s business model. Drawing on insights from prior literature and findings from the DHL case, we discuss evidence that corporate IT platforms enable business model evolution to the extent that they generate digital options that can be exercised by managers to renew value propositions for customers

The Complementarity of Corporate IT Alignment and Business Unit IT Alignment: An Analysis of Their Joint Effects on Business Unit Performance

Alignment between IT and business strategy is a perennial challenge for IT executives, in part due to the evolving nature of organizational structure. In multi-business organizations (MBOs), a pressing issue for IT executives is how to improve the performance of each strategic business unit (SBU). In this paper we examine how IT alignment in MBOs affects SBU performance. We distinguish between IT alignment at the corporate and SBU levels and propose that these two types of IT alignment are complementary and exert joint effects on SBU performance. Two hypotheses related to these joint effects are developed and tested using data collected from an international survey of IT executives. Our findings indicate that complementarities between corporate IT alignment and SBU IT alignment enhance SBU performance. The primary contribution of this paper is explaining how different types of IT alignment in MBOs - individually and jointly - affect SBU performance

A Complex Adaptive Systems View of Digital Ecodynamics for Business Performance among Manufacturing SMEs

Taking a complex adaptive systems approach, this paper investigates the different configurations of digital ecodynamics – IT capabilities, dynamic capabilities, and environmental conditions – associated to high levels of business performance in manufacturing SMEs. Results from a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 126 manufacturing SMEs show that, as expected from our theoretical development, these firms attain high business performance when they dispose of at least one IT capability and one dynamic capability. More specifically, IT capabilities for innovation and flexibility along with dynamic capabilities for coordination and integration are necessary for high business performance since they appear in all high-performing configurations. Our study contributes to information systems research by taking a holistic approach to the IT capability-performance link in the specific context of SMEs

Exploring the roles of people, governance and technology in organizational readiness for emerging technologies

The rapid development and release of emerging technologies have made their adoption challenging. Most often there are failing issues in organizational adoption of emerging technologies. It is yet unclear which component(s) of organization play the prominent role(s) in organizational readiness to adopt emerging technologies. Using a mixed method, this study conducted an online survey of 83 South African organizations for server virtualization adoption. Server virtualization is an emerging technology being widely adopted in most organizations in developed countries. IT executives rated server virtualization as the second-most important technology to help achieve cost reductions and optimize productivity in recent surveys. Very little is known about server virtualization adoption in organizations in developing countries. It was found that people and technology play prominent roles in South African organizational readiness to adopt server virtualization. Server virtualization has certain inhibitors such as lack of IT skill, and software and license costs that the IT industry and adopting organizations should consider

Is Implementing ERP Like Pouring Concrete Into a Company? Impact of Enterprise Systems on Organizational Agility

Literature is divided on whether enterprise systems promote or hinder organizational agility. To the best of our knowledge, this paradox has never been rigorously theoretically analyzed nor empirically investigated. This paper seeks to address this paradox by leveraging upon innovation assimilation literature and knowledge based and capabilities based views of organizations. We propose a theoretical framework of the effects of ERP assimilation on agility. We also theorize that the dynamic capability of systems agility not only has a direct effect on organizational agility, but also moderates the effect of ERP assimilation levels on agility. We validate the proposed framework by conducting a cross-sectional survey across 215 organizations. The results validate our key theoretical claims: higher ERP assimilation levels positively influence organizational agility. Moreover, systems agility acts as a critical enabler by amplifying the net positive impact of ERP assimilation on organization agility in addition to having a strong direct effect

Do Organizational Competencies Influence How Enterprise Systems Foster Organizational Agility?

Recent research indicates that higher ERP assimilation in organizations has positive influence on organizational agility, and that the dynamic capability of systems agility moderates the effects of ERP assimilation on agility. In this paper, we extend this research, to investigate the knowledge conditions under which enterprise systems influence organizational agility. We propose a theoretical framework incorporating two organizational competencies – IT Competence in Business(ITCB) and Business Competence in IT(BCIT) – and theorize that both ITCB and BCIT have mediating and moderating effects on organizational agility. To empirically validate the theoretical framework, we conducted a quantitative cross-sectional survey across 215 organizations. The results validate our key theorizing on the dual effects of ITCB and BCIT on organizational agility. In addition, when organizations have high levels of ITCB and high ERP assimilation, we see surprising results in the negative moderating effects of ITCB on the influence of ERP assimilation on organizational agility