Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> IS Inhibits Organizational Agility <s> Executives make few moves more critical than their decisions about which technology-infrastructure investments will promote future strategic agility. ::: ::: To pinpoint best practices, three IT experts marshaled 10 years of data from 89 leading enterprises. One finding was that when companies describe their IT-infrastructure capabilities as services instead of equipment (say, the provision of a fully maintained laptop computer with access to all company systems and the Internet), they do a better job of putting a value on what they are buying. ::: ::: Understanding the 70 IT-infrastructure services that emerge consistently from the research can help executives identify which investments will make sense for which strategic business initiative. And understanding whether the contemplated initiative is supply-side, internally focused or demand-side can help managers decide whether to make the infrastructure investment on a business-unit level or enterprisewide. ::: ::: The authors find that leading companies are making regular, systematic, modular and targeted IT-infrastructure investments on the basis of overall strategic direction. If other companies can learn to recognize which IT-infrastructure capabilities are needed for which kinds of initiatives, they can have some assurance that the investments they make today will serve the strategies of tomorrow. <s> BIB001 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> IS Inhibits Organizational Agility <s> The current highly dynamic business environment requires businesses to be agile. Business agility is the ability to swiftly and easily change businesses and business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage unpredictable external and internal changes. This study reports on a cross-industry analysis of change factors requiring agility and assesses agility gaps that companies are facing in four industry sectors in the Netherlands. A framework was constructed to measure the perceived gaps between the current level of business agility and the required level of business agility. The questionnaire and in-depth interviews held reveal that today's businesses perceive to lack the agility required to quickly respond to changes, whose speed and requirements are difficult to predict. The paper presents rankings of generic and sector-specific agility gaps. These show that although some generic change factors requiring agility exist, the change factors requiring agility that cause agility gaps differ across industry sectors. Among the factors that enable or hinder business agility, the existence of inflexible legacy systems is perceived to be a very important disabler in achieving more business agility. A number of basic principles and directions are discussed to transform Information Technology from barrier into key enabler for increased agility in organizations and business networks. <s> BIB002 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> IS Inhibits Organizational Agility <s> This study develops a research model of how the technical, behavioral, and business capabilities of IT personnel are associated with IT infrastructure capabilities, and how the latter are associated with IT-dependent organizational agility, which is conceptualized as comprising IT-dependent system, information, and strategic agility. Analysis of crosssectional data collected from 293 IT managers generally corroborates the hypothesized relationships, showing that the technical and behavioral capabilities of IT personnel have a positive effect on infrastructure capabilities. The analysis also provides evidence that the effect of infrastructure capabilities on IT-dependent strategic agility is direct, as well as mediated by IT-dependent system and information agility. The validity of the findings is strengthened by demonstrating that the hypothesized research model fits the data better than two alternative theoretically-anchored models describing different relationships between the same constructs. This study advances understanding of the interrelationships between two major subsets of IT capabilities, and their relationships with the agility afforded by IT. <s> BIB003 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> IS Inhibits Organizational Agility <s> Recent innovations in utility computing, web services, and service-oriented architectures, combined with a growing array of IT skills, have improved firms' ability to be more agile in responding to change. Using the resource-based view of the firm, prior research suggests that IT resources, in isolation, are unlikely to yield superior performance and so as firms try to boost their agility, the question becomes how to configure IT resources to prepare for, or react to, change. In this paper, we posit that managerial IT capabilities based on IT-business partnerships, strategic planning, and ex-post IT project analysis lead to the development of technical IT capabilities associated with a flexible IT infrastructure which in turn drives agility or a firm's ability to react to change in its products and markets. Using data from matched surveys of IT and business executives in 241 firms, we find that managerial and technical capabilities affect agility. In further testing, we reveal that in a stable setting, technical IT capabilities are more important to agility than managerial IT capabilities, while in a dynamic setting, the opposite is true. Thus, for firms operating in volatile markets, effective models of managerial IT governance are essential for delivering superior agility or adaptiveness. <s> BIB004 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> IS Inhibits Organizational Agility <s> An electroconductive laminated window having an electroconductive coating applied to one interior substrate surface with a pair of bus bars electrically connecting a source of electrical potential thereto. The bus bars include an electroconductive layer having volume resistivity less than about 10-2 ohm-cm interposed between and conformable to the surface configurations of the electroconductive coating and a flexible metallic current carrying member. The metallic current carrying member is preferably a mesh of thin copper foil which is substantially bendable in its own plane, and the electroconductive layer is preferably a metallic layer substantially free of non-metallic components, consisting of a mixture of finely divided electroconductive particles and finely divided metal alloy particles having a fusion temperature between about 70 DEG C. and about 150 DEG C. <s> BIB005 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> IS Inhibits Organizational Agility <s> Firms are increasingly dependent on external resources and are establishing portfolios of interorganizational relationships (IRs) to leverage external resources for competitive advantage. However, the systems of information technology (IT) and process capabilities that firms should develop to manage IR portfolios dynamically are not well-understood. In order to theorize how key structural IT capabilities (IT integration and IT reconfiguration) and competitive process capabilities (process alignment, partnering flexibility, and offering flexibility) operate as systems of complements, we draw on the competitive dynamics perspective and resource dependency theory and on the literature for IT business value, interorganizational systems, and interorganizational relationship management. We also theorize how a firm's IR portfolio moderates the effects of structural IT capabilities on competitive process capabilities and why a firm's environmental turbulence moderates the effects of complementary process capabilities on competitive performance. We test our model using survey data from 318 firms in 4 industries. Our results provide broad support for the following: (1) structural IT capabilities and process capabilities operating as a system of complements, (2) the effects of structural IT capabilities on competitive process capabilities being contingent on IR portfolio concentration, and (3) the effects of complementary process capabilities on competitive performance being contingent on environmental turbulence. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of how firms should develop complementary systems of structural IT capabilities and competitive process capabilities to manage IR portfolios dynamically and leverage external resources. <s> BIB006 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> IS Inhibits Organizational Agility <s> Understanding how IT contributes to a firm's competitive advantage has long been of interest. While managers have made significant investments in IT, inflexible legacy systems hinder their ability to respond quickly to market opportunities. Our study examined how the flexibility of an organization's IT infrastructure enhanced information generation and dissemination and that this increased their ability to respond to rapidly changing environments. Our discussion of these information building and information leveraging effects was grounded in the resource-based view of the firm. We empirically tested our model using data collected from senior executives of 105 manufacturing and service firms. We found that IT infrastructure flexibility was positively related to information generation and dissemination. Moreover, information generation was significantly related to organizational responsiveness. Finally, organizational responsiveness was positively related to the firm's competitive advantage. These results showed the importance of developing a flexible IT infrastructure that can be quickly adapted and reconfigured to meet information processing demands in dynamic environments. <s> BIB007
The inhibiting perspective maintains that complex IT architecture may hinder organizations from being agile  BIB004 . For example,  argue that IS cannot promote agility because they are built to help enforce control and efficiency. Agility, on the other hand, is spurred by chaos rather than control and efficiency. As discussed earlier in this article, organizational agility means having more options than have been preset. However, information systems can be optimized only in situations when the process is well defined. The balance between control and flexibility is not always set at the optimal level; hence, IS may inhibit agility in certain circumstances. BIB004 points out that once an IS is implemented, it will soon become a legacy system, while technology keeps developing. Legacy systems reduce flexibility and innovation, and restrict rather than release the improvisational skills of users as they confront new and unpredictable situations. BIB005 indicate that information systems that are built at a certain point are relevant to solve specific problems that were important at that given time. The dynamic business environment can cause the information system to be out of date with the needs of future business conditions. Especially, large organizations are entangled in large, complex IS with hard coded embedded business processes and complex linkage between applications, which are developed in segregation by different IS vendors BIB002 . Changing requirements on such information systems takes a long time and much effort to implement and shrink the IT budget to be spent on innovation, which is the main provider to organizational agility. Although tight IT integration (e.g., collaboration with business partners) streamlines and speeds up the automation of business processes, it discourages any modification that may become essential in the instance of changing business requirements (e.g., increase technological switching cost) BIB006 . A flexible IT infrastructure allows an organization to respond to environmental change BIB003 . On the contrary, an inflexible IT infrastructure inhibits the firm's ability to respond to market opportunities, due to delays or rushed implementations and limited information sharing BIB007 BIB001 . Legacy systems are often rigid, which also limits an organization's ability to respond to external opportunities. Furthermore, attempts to upgrade such systems often lead to performance issues without an increase in flexibility BIB007 .