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

TANGIBLE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE ASSETS AND ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY: AN INVESTIGATION OF MANUFACTURING SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

This paper investigates the role of tangible IT infrastructure assets –the portfolio of specific applications to which a firm endows itself – in enabling organizational agility and business performance in the context of SMEs. Building upon past literature, we regroup tangible IT infrastructure assets into three categories: IT for flexibility, IT for innovation, and IT for integration. Each category includes a series of specific technologies (i.e., CNC, CAD and ERP). We theorize that tangible IT infrastructure assets positively influence organizational agility and business performance. We employ a survey methodology to test the proposed hypotheses. One hundred and twenty-six manufacturing SMEs completed the survey. The results support the hypothesized relations. This research complements previous research that has studied intangible abstract constructs as antecedents of organizational agility, it confirms the results of past research examining the agility-business performance link, and it addresses the scarcity of strategic IS research in SMEs

Dynamic Capabilities in Information Systems Research: A Critical Review, Synthesis of Current Knowledge, and Recommendations for Future Research

Over the past twenty years, the dynamic capabilities view (DCV) has gained prominence in the IS field as a theoretical perspective from which to explain competitive advantage in turbulent environments. While there are quite a few review studies of dynamic capabilities (DCs) in the strategic management domain, research on DCs in the IS area has not been synthesized nor critically analyzed. The result is that the role that IT plays in the DCV remains largely ambiguous, and the way we think and conduct IS research on DCs is unquestioned. Addressing this, we conducted a critical review of DCs in IS research based on 136 papers. Our review provides a synthesis of contemporary knowledge on DCs that emphasizes the role of IT in this research, and a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying this literature. In addition, we develop a minimum DC definition for future research as a solution to the conceptual issues that we uncovered via the critical analysis. We further leverage the remaining findings of our critical review by providing a detailed research agenda for future investigations on DCs by IS scholars

The Role of Business Intelligence and Communication Technologies in Organizational Agility: A Configurational Approach

This study examines the role that business intelligence (BI) and communication technologies play in how firms may achieve organizational sensing agility, decision making agility, and acting agility in different organizational and environmental contexts. Based on the information-processing view of organizations and dynamic capability theory, we suggest a configurational analytic framework that departs from the standard linear paradigm to examine how IT’s effect on agility is embedded in a configuration of organizational and environmental elements. In line with this approach, we use fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze field survey data from diverse industries. Our findings suggest equifinal pathways to organizational agility and the specific boundary conditions of our middle-range theory that determine what role BI and communication technologies play in organizations’ achieving organizational agility. We discuss implications for theory and practice and discuss future research avenues

A meta-analysis on the effects of IT capability toward agility and performance: New directions for information systems research

Information technology (IT) capability is an organizational capability that enables organizations to acquire, deploy, combine, and reconfigure IT resources. As such, it is often investigated in conjunction with organizational agility—an organization’s ability to sense and respond to changes—and organizational performance. Studies on IT capability distinguish between reactive and proactive IT capability and identify varying effects in relation to agility and performance. While reactive IT capability supports and enhances work processes, proactive IT capability supports and enhances business strategies. In the light of the mixed results of prior research, we conduct a meta-analytical investigation into the varying effects that reactive and proactive IT capability have on organizational agility and organizational performance. We identified 6.436 studies from multiple sources that we systematically reduced to include 72 empirical studies in our analysis. Contrary to previous results and widely held opinion, our meta-analysis neither finds support for differences in effect size between reactive (r(+) = 0.39, k = 34, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) [0.34, 0.44]) and proactive IT capability (r(+) = 0.38, k = 21, 95% CI [0.31, 0.45]) toward agility (z = 0.68, p = 0.25), nor from reactive IT capability (r(+) = 0.31, k = 43, 95% CI [0.26, 0.37]) and proactive IT capability (r(+) = 0.33, k = 25, 95% CI [0.27, 0.40]) toward performance (z = 1.11, p = 0.13). Given the importance of IT capability, we discuss possible explanations and propose four areas for future research: latency, sequence, configurational, and theoretical multiplicity of IT capability

Digital Transformation Capabilities in Manufacturing SMEs: Gaining Agility through IT Capability Configurations

Adopting a capability-based view of digital transformation as a 2nd-order ‘dynamic’ capability, this paper investigates how 1st-order dynamic and operational IT capabilities are strategically configured and aligned by manufacturing SMEs in order to gain organizational agility. Resulting from a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 67 Canadian SMEs, our results show that a high level of organizational agility is concretized when these firms align at least three dynamic IT capabilities and one operational IT capability. Through three high-performing configurations composed of the sensing, learning, coordinating and integrating dynamic IT capabilities along with the IT management capability and e-business capability, we demonstrate which capabilities are present to achieve a high level of organizational agility, and under what environmental condition they manifest themselves. Providing a richer description and deeper understanding of the interrelationships between the IT capabilities required by manufacturing SMEs’ digital transformation, our contributions are both practical and theoretical

Effects of Intellectual and Social Alignment on Organizational Agility: A Configurational Theory Approach

Literature has shown that business-information technology (IT) alignment can exert both positive and negative influences on organizational agility, giving rise to the IT alignment-agility paradox. To better understand this paradox at a more granular level, we conceptualize the sensing and responding dimensions of organizational agility as two independent constructs and suggest a nonlinear analytical approach. Based on configurational and contextual perspectives, this study investigates how intellectual and social alignment and organizational and environmental elements combine into multiple configurations to affect sensing and responding capabilities. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is used to analyze the survey data from 135 dyads of business and IT executives from the Chinese shipbuilding industry. Results show that different equifinal pathways can be used to achieve high sensing and responding capabilities, in which intellectual and social alignment play heterogeneous roles depending on the specific contexts. This study extends the IT-enabled agility literature by deepening our understanding of the effects of multidimensional IT alignment on multidimensional organizational agility and providing new insights into the IT alignment-agility paradox

Achieving digital-driven patient agility in the era of big data

There is still a limited understanding of the necessary skill, talent, and expertise to manage digital technologies as a crucial enabler of the hospitals ability to adequately sense and respond to patient needs and wishes, i.e., patient agility. Therefore, this investigates how hospital departments can leverage a digital dy-namic capability to enable the departments patient agility. This study embraces the dynamic capabilities theory, develops a research model, and tests it accordingly using data from 90 clinical hospital departments from the Netherlands through an online survey. The model's hypothesized relationships are tested using structural equation modeling (SEM). The outcomes demonstrate the significance of digital dynamic capability in developing patient sensing and responding capabili-ties that, in turn, positively influence patient service performance. Outcomes are very relevant for the hospital practice now, as hospitals worldwide need to trans-form healthcare delivery processes using digital technologies and increase clinical productivity.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, The 20th IFIP Conference e-Business, e-Services, and e-Society I3E2021. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2105.0901