Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled responding capability refers to an organization's capability to deploy its ES resources and embed them in its production development, systems development, supply chain and production, and flexible resource utilization strategies and processes to quickly and efficiently respond to changes. <s> Agility is vital to the innovation and competitive performance of firms in contemporary business environments. Firms are increasingly relying on information technologies, including process, knowledge, and communication technologies, to enhance their agility. The purpose of this paper is to broaden understanding about the strategic role of IT by examining the nomological network of influences through which IT impacts firm performance. By drawing upon recent thinking in the strategy, entrepreneurship, and IT management literatures, this paper uses a multitheoretic lens to argue that information technology investments and capabilities influence firm performance through three significant organizational capabilities (agility, digital options, and entrepreneurial alertness) and strategic processes (capability-building, entrepreneurial action, and coevolutionary adaptation). We also propose that these dynamic capabilities and strategic processes impact the ability of firms to launch many and varied competitive actions and that, in turn, these competitive actions are a significant antecedent of firm performance. Through our theorizing, we draw attention to a significant and reframed role of IT as a digital options generator in contemporary firms. <s> BIB001 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled responding capability refers to an organization's capability to deploy its ES resources and embed them in its production development, systems development, supply chain and production, and flexible resource utilization strategies and processes to quickly and efficiently respond to changes. <s> The existing discourse on IT-enabled enterprise agility views the internal organizational processes of IT capability development and organizational learning as the primary means of attaining agility, but has neglected the new dynamics of competition in the present networked economy. As Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs) may be crucial to enterprise agility for organizations engaged in intense, inter-network competition, we apply the literature on business ecosystems to analyze the case of Alibaba.com, a B2B portal that organizes one of the largest DBEs worldwide. In doing so, a process model of how a DBE may be developed and leveraged for enterprise agility is inductively derived that sheds light on the antecedents, nature and implications of DBE development in three distinct phases. With its findings, this study contributes to a networked perspective of IT-enabled enterprise agility, and provides practitioners with a comprehensive and empirically-supported framework for the development and subsequent leverage of a DBE. <s> BIB002
Organizations that have used ES can leverage the digital business ecosystem to advance agility BIB002 . Information is shared across the ecosystem regardless of geographical or time constraints, which can reduce response time. Information and business process integration within the organization's ecosystem enable an organization to have better visibility regarding the operation of its business partner, as well as strengthen the relationship within the whole supply chain, thus enabling organization responsiveness. Furthermore, the availability of ES built-in flexibility provided by ES vendors, such as Web services, and SOA determines OA  . Further, organizations can increase their digital process reach and richness through ES. Digitized process richness refers to the quality of information collected about transactions in the process, transparency of that information to other processes and systems that are linked to it, and the ability to use that information to reengineer the process BIB001 . Digitized process reach refers to the extent to which a firm deploys common, integrated, and connected IT-enabled processes. The capability of ES to provide digitized process reach and richness enables organizational response capability as it facilitates organizations to quickly and easily (re)configure and mobilize organizational resources/capabilities. BIB001 provide the example of eBay's online auction which relies on its enterprise system to integrate its sales processes with a variety of partner processes, including payment and shipping processes. The extent to which organizations exploit ES to underpin their strategies can result in significant variations in ES-enabled responding capability and in OA. This leads to the following proposition: 