Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled sensing capability refers to the ability of an organization to quickly and efficiently use its ES to digitize the process of sensing and develop a strategic market foresight about its business environment. <s> The ideas of Darwinian evolution can illuminate the niches in which systems can flourish in today's tumultuous IT environment---and help identify the inevitable evolutionary changes. <s> BIB001 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled sensing capability refers to the ability of an organization to quickly and efficiently use its ES to digitize the process of sensing and develop a strategic market foresight about its business environment. <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> BIB002 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled sensing capability refers to the ability of an organization to quickly and efficiently use its ES to digitize the process of sensing and develop a strategic market foresight about its business environment. <s> In many markets it is becoming impossible to remove or ignore sources of turbulence and volatility. Hence, supply chain managers must accept uncertainty, but still need to develop a strategy that enables them to match supply and demand at an acceptable cost. The ability to achieve this has been termed supply chain agility. Information and, importantly, agile information systems have been recognised as being a critical factor in achieving agility in the supply chain. To date studies have suggested that high levels of coordination between organisations, necessary for improved supply chain performance, demand high levels of integration between partners' information systems. However, these high levels of integration reduce the ability to frequently and rapidly make changes to trading relationships, something that is a prerequisite of the agility paradigm. This paper seeks to explore how a number of emergent information systems offer the possibility of both deep integration and increased flexibility. This paper is exploratory in nature. A single case study of an organisation seeking to improve supply chain agility is reported. Existing literature and the insights provided by the case study are combined to identify a number of themes for further study. <s> BIB003 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled sensing capability refers to the ability of an organization to quickly and efficiently use its ES to digitize the process of sensing and develop a strategic market foresight about its business environment. <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> BIB004 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled sensing capability refers to the ability of an organization to quickly and efficiently use its ES to digitize the process of sensing and develop a strategic market foresight about its business environment. <s> The market enthusiasm generated around investment in CRM technology is in stark contrast to the naysaying by many academic and business commentators. This raises an important research question concerning the extent to which companies should continue to invest in building a CRM capability. Drawing on field interviews and a survey of senior executives, the results reveal that a superior CRM capability can create positional advantage and subsequent improved performance. Further, it is shown that to be most successful, CRM programs should focus on latent or unarticulated customer needs that underpin a proactive market orientation. <s> BIB005 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s> ES-enabled sensing capability refers to the ability of an organization to quickly and efficiently use its ES to digitize the process of sensing and develop a strategic market foresight about its business environment. <s> Drawing upon the resource-based view and the process-oriented view, we develop a conceptual model to examine the business value of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, using a dataset of 150 U.S. banking firms. The results show that: (1) CRM resources improve firm performance mainly through creating strategic benefits (e.g. increased customer retention, improved product and service), although there are significant operational benefits (e.g. efficiency gains and cost reduction in customer- oriented business processes); (2) in different competitive environments, the same resources play different roles in creating strategic benefits: technological resources have a weaker impact on strategic benefits in more competitive environments, while organizational alignment has a stronger impact in such environments; (3) operational benefits tend to be "competed away", while strategic benefits sustain to generate performance advantage in spite of competition. These findings provide important implications for understanding how CRM value is shaped by various resources in competitive environments. <s> BIB006
The sensing process includes capturing, interpreting, and analyzing change signals from business environment. ES functionalities can digitize the sensing process. Table 4 juxtaposes the concept matrix of the ES-enabled sensing capability, which is followed by a discussion of the construct. Survey X X X ES, when implemented correctly, offer organizations many advantages, such as standardizing procedures across global divisions, consolidating detailed transaction data from different functions, and methods to access data throughout the entire range of organizational activities BIB001 . Therefore, ES enable organizational sensing capabilities by extending richness and range of information available to the organization, hence, creating organizational agility BIB002 . Enterprise systems offer global connectivity of activities, data, and process. This connectivity makes it easier to integrate information internally across departments and externally with business partners  . Internal and external integration allow organizations to sense opportunities and problems in various areas such as changes in customer demand or partnering relationships BIB003 . ES store data centrally and allow the use of powerful data analysis tools, such as business intelligence, to quickly see hidden trends in data and to disseminate the information across an organization. Although  postulate that ES alone increases organizational efficiency while reducing organizational agility, their research also suggests that, in cases where ES is complemented with the concurrent implementation of flexibility-focused initiatives (e.g., knowledge management system), ES would improve both organizational efficiency and innovation capability simultaneously. This allows organizations to make better decisions BIB006 . Sensing processes incur costs. Therefore, only significant changes that can create considerable impacts with a moderate level of severity should be treated. Organizations that can quickly classify changes will have a more efficient sensing mechanism. When organizations use ES with built-in KPIs and benchmarks, they will be able to quickly filter for potential changes that have significant magnitude. This allows them to sense changes in real time while lowering operating costs and increasing agility BIB004 . BIB005 , for example, suggests that the customer analytic functionality of CRM can enable organizations to develop proactive rather than reactive market sensing. ES provide digital options by digitizing knowledge and business processes BIB002 . Digitized knowledge with sufficient reach and richness can significantly impact a firm's sensing capability and, through that, its agility. Digitized knowledge reach is defined as comprehensiveness and accessibility of codified knowledge in a firm's knowledge base and the interconnected networks and systems for enhancing interactions among individuals Volume 31 Article 8 for knowledge transfer and sharing BIB002 . Digitized knowledge richness is defined as systems of interactions among organizational members to support sense-making, perspective sharing, and development of tacit knowledge BIB002 . While digitized knowledge represents ES-enabled strategy execution ability, the strategy generation for business environment sensing is facilitated by market (business environmental) foresight and organizational learning ability. The above leads to: 