Medidas de percepción del Profesorado del Centro

The following sections look at important recent papers on organizational agility published in Information Systems top journals and conferences, with a focus on empirical research. The list has been extended by some significant older papers.

Looking at the ways organizational agility has been conceptualized in Information Systems research shows that authors deal with various aspects, labelled organizatio-nal agility (most common – see Lu & Ramamurthy (2011) for a discussion of earlier works), operational agility (Huang et al. 2014), business agility (van Oosterhout et al. 2006) or customer agility (Roberts & Grover 2012). In conceptualizing these terms, many authors refer to a sense-and respond framework, although some only focus on the aspect of responding (Chen et al. 2013; Fink & Neumann 2007; van Oosterhout et al. 2006). The idea of speed is common, with authors pointing out that sensing and/ or responding should happen quickly (Roberts & Grover 2012), swiftly (Lyytinen & Rose 2006; van Oosterhout et al. 2006), “with speed and surprise”

(Sambamurthy et al. 2007; Schnackenberg et al. 2011) or “with ease, speed, and dexterity” (Tallon & Pinsonneault 2011).

Paper Construct label Construct conceptualization Börjesson et al.

2006

agility ability to respond to environmental events is hence the essential and distinguishing feature of the agile organization

Chakravarty et al. 2013

organizational agility

following Overby et al. 2006: agility as a strategic capability

Chen et al. 2014 business process agility

ease and speed with which firms can alter their business processes to respond to threats in their markets (Tallon, 2008)

Choi et al. 2010 IS agility ability to quickly make changes to IT applications in response to changing business conditions Ciborra 1996 platform a chameleon-like organization conceived as a

laboratory for rapid restructuring

ability to allow a firm to adapt successfully to changes in the external environment –

agility ability to sense and respond rapidly Hovorka &

Operational agility capability that enables organizations to sense changes in turbulent business environments, as well as conceive appropriate competitive actions to seize market opportunities

Kharabe &

Lyytinen 2012

organizational agility

ability to detect and respond to opportunities and threats with ease, speed, and dexterity

firm’s ability to cope with rapid, relentless, and uncertain changes and thrive in a competitive environment of continually and unpredictably

an ISD organization’s ability to sense and respond swiftly to technical changes and new business opportunities.

Mathiassen &

Vainio 2007

dynamic capabilities

help organizations to adapt to the changes in their environment

Ngai et al. 2011 supply chain agility organization’s ability to respond to unexpected market changes and convert these changes to business opportunities

Richardson et al. 2014

Enterprise agility proposes a positive connection between a firm’s IT-related decisions, level of agility, and business success (Sambamurthy et al., 2003)

Paper Construct label Construct conceptualization Roberts &

Grover 2012

customer agility degree to which a firm is able to sense and respond quickly to customer-based opportunities for

referencing Sambamurthy et al (2003) - ability to detect and seize market opportunities with speed and surprise

ability to detect and respond to opportunities and threats with ease, speed, and dexterity

Tallon 2007 business process agility

ease and speed with which firms can alter their processes to respond to threats or opportunities in their markets

van Oosterhout et al. 2006

business agility being able to swiftly change businesses and business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage unpredictable external and internal changes

Zheng et al.

2011

collective agility attribute emergent from the day-to-day practices of social actors; performance

Table 1 Conceptualizations of organizational agility in IS research

Existing research looks at questions like how to develop superior firm-wide IT capa-bility to successfully manage IT to realize agility (Lu & Ramamurthy 2011), how agility can be measured (e.g. Overby et al. 2006) or the ways IT impacts firm perfor-mance (Sambamurthy et al. 2003). This has led to a good understanding of factors supporting agility in organizations, e.g. organizational control (Huang et al. 2014), learning capabilities (Lyytinen & Rose 2006) or IT capability (Lu & Ramamurthy 2011; Chen et al. 2013).

Agility is usually defined using a number of similar terms. It is commonly concep-tualized as an ability (Overby et al. 2006; Tallon & Pinsonneault 2011; Lu &

Ramamurthy 2011), capability (Huang et al. 2014), or degree (Roberts & Grover 2012). Thus, it is seen as something that exists in an organization to be measured and used as the basis for quantitative statements like “[a] positive link between alignment and agility applies to all firms” (Tallon & Pinsonneault 2011). For example, Roberts

& Grover (2012) hypothesize a model of relationships between IT infrastructure, agility and competitive success, and test their hypotheses in an empirical survey of marketing managers. They conclude that “a Web-based customer infrastructure

facilitates a firm’s customer-sensing capability; furthermore, analytical ability posi-tively moderates this relationship” (p. 231). Likewise, (Sambamurthy et al. 2007) develop a detailed measurement model for organizational agility using organizatio-nal and IT capabilities as independent variables, entrepreneurial and adaptive agility as intermediate outcomes, and profitability, competitive position and barriers to erosion as dependent variables. These are then measured in a large-scale survey.

The concept of agility as a capability has been developed in several ways. A useful extension is the view of agility as a dynamic capability. Roberts & Grover (2012) draw this concept from the evolutionary theory of the firm (Nelson & Winter 1982).

The key idea is that capabilities need to be adapted continually:

Since managers make decisions under uncertainty and are boundedly rational, they satisfice rather than optimize in searching for and selecting solutions to problems. The implication is that firms should continually reconfigure their existing capabilities. (Roberts & Grover 2012, p.237) Eisenhardt & Martin (2000, p.1107) define dynamic capabilities as “organizational and strategic routines by which firms achieve new resource configurations as markets emerge, collide, split, evolve, and die.” Dynamic capabilities, however, are not always easy to differentiate from agility: Mathiassen & Vainio (2007) use the terms almost synonymously. Conversely, Overby et al. (2006, p.121) clearly distin-guish between the two concepts:

The dynamic capabilities concept is relevant to all types of firm processes, whereas enterprise agility includes only those processes relevant for sensing and responding to environmental change. In a sense, enterprise agility can be thought of as being enabled by a specific subset of dynamic capabilities.

Thus, the concept addresses a weakness of the resource based view, its static nature.

Moreover, the recognition of the limits of rationality in the daily practice of management seems to be particularly useful. An alternative conceptualization of agility that has a similar focus on activities in organizations is proposed by Zheng et al. (2011), who define collective agility as a performance, “an attribute emergent from the day-to-day practices of social actors” (p. 305). They contrast this with the received views of “agility as empirically validated small group methods and practices” (p. 305) and “agility as an organizational capability” (bid.), which amount to the practices generally called ‘agile software development’ (Fowler & Highsmith

2001), as well as to the concept of organizational agility (they refer e.g. to Highsmith 2002):

We develop a third and distinct perspective, what we call collective agility seen as a ‘structuring property’ (Giddens, 1984) of a collective, instantiated in improvisational behaviour of individuals and groups and in their social interactions. In other words, collective agility is an attribute emergent from the day-to-day practices of social actors. We thus explore agility as a performance. (p.305, italics in original)

The authors describe agility as “an expression of what people do or achieve, rather than what they might do or capabilities they hold” (p. 329). This shifts the focus of research to the practices in an organization, where agility is seen as the result of a socio-technical process. This thesis will adopt this conceptualization as it overcomes some of the limitations of traditional views on agility discussed before, like the contrast between dynamic information needs and static technology described by Galliers (2011). Moreover, the focus on performances enables more dynamic con-ceptualizations of information systems, as illustrated by Zheng et al.'s (2011) case study, which looks at a computing grid for particle physics supporting the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics.