Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> As we approach the twenty‐first century, manufacturing success and survival are becoming more and more difficult to ensure. This fact is rooted in the emergence of a new business era that embraces “change” as one of its major characteristics. The emphasis is now on adaptability to changes in the business environment and on addressing market and customer needs proactively. The emerging paradigm is agile manufacturing. Understanding and responding to changes, and taking advantage of changes through strategic utilisation of managerial and manufacturing methods and tools, are some of the pivotal concepts of agile manufacturing. This paper discusses these concepts and presents a methodology to assist manufacturing companies to achieve agility. Industrial questionnaire surveys and case studies are carried out to support and validate the methodology. Results and conclusions derived from the surveys and case studies in support of the methodology are reported. <s> BIB001 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <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>  <s> Abstract Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software merges a firm's data, information flows and business processes into a single package. Vendors argue that ERP provides an extremely useful strategic resource to enhance competitiveness and make it possible for a firm to leverage its other resources more effectively and efficiently. In addition, they allege that ERP encourages a system-wide perspective that is a basis for collaboration and a systems orientation. However, an examination of ERP systems using criteria established in research on resource-based views of the firm and chaos/complexity theory indicates that these claims are overstated. Observation suggests that even if ERP is necessary to coordinate complicated, multifaceted operations, it is far from sufficient to promote a strong competitive position over the long term. Moreover, ERP systems fit best within mechanistic, clockwork organizations dominated by routine, highly programmed technologies and operations, yet it is the non-routine learning and change processes found in complex, self-organizing systems that enable firms to create distinctive competitive advantages from ERP outputs. ERP makes possible deep changes in relationships, culture, and behaviors that can be crucial sources of advantage in the knowledge economy, but the structures and cultures most able to achieve this level of change are a poor fit with ERP requirements. To reconcile this paradox, we propose a dual-core, loosely coupled organization that views ERP as an enabling technology to build and augment social and intellectual capital, rather than as an information technology (IT) solution for organizational inefficiencies. Propositions for using ERP as a foundation for social and intellectual capital formation are introduced. Implications for research and practice are discussed. <s> BIB003 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> We examined the influence of information technology (IT) acceptance on organizational agility. The study was based on a well-established theoretical model, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). We attempted to identify the relationships between IT acceptance and organizational agility in order to see how the acceptance of technology contributes to a firm's ability to be an agile competitor. Structural equation modeling techniques were used to analyze the data. Results from a survey involving 329 managers and executives in manufacturing firms in Malaysia showed that actual system or technology usage had the strongest direct effect on organizational agility. Meanwhile, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of IT influenced organizational agility indirectly through actual systems or technology use and attitudes towards using the technology. The results have several implications for IS management. <s> BIB004 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> The full potential of the expected role of Information Technology (IT) in facilitating organizational adaptation has not yet been realized because most of the existing systems do not lend themselves to the levels of flexibility required to support changes in business processes. This problem is accentuated with increase of inter-organizational linkages involving disparate IT systems. Web services have emerged as a disruptive technology, with a real potential of enabling flexible business processes. This paper examines the influence of Web services on business process flexibility and analyses its impact on organizational adaptation. <s> BIB005 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> In turbulent environments, enterprise agility, that is, the ability of firms to sense environmental change and respond readily, is an important determinant of firm success. We define and deconstruct enterprise agility, delineate enterprise agility from similar concepts in the business research literature, explore the underlying capabilities that support enterprise agility, explicate the enabling role of information technology (IT) and digital options, and propose a method for measuring enterprise agility. The concepts in this paper are offered as foundational building blocks for the overall research program on enterprise agility and the enabling role of IT. <s> BIB006 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <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> BIB007 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> This article is a review of work published in various journals on the topics of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) between January 2000 and May 2006. A total of 313 articles from 79 journals are reviewed. The article intends to serve three goals. First, it will be useful to researchers who are interested in understanding what kinds of questions have been addressed in the area of ERP. Second, the article will be a useful resource for searching for research topics. Third, it will serve as a comprehensive bibliography of the articles published during the period. The literature is analysed under six major themes and nine sub-themes. <s> BIB008 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> Enterprise systems (ES) are industry-specific, customizable software packages that integrate information and business process in organizations. Despite the advantages associated with implementing ES, their success has been mixed. This has attracted the interest of researchers and resulted in a proliferation of literature on implementation. However, the extant ES studies lack a theoretical framework for the examination of ES use and its implications for change in organizations. We seek to bridge this research gap by proposing a theoretical framework for change induced through ES use. This paper contributes to theory in two areas. First, by analytically separating the notions of structure, institution, and organization, we illustrate a consistent application of Giddens' structuration theory to ES use. Second, we develop a structurational model of ES-induced change that explicates the relationship between specific characteristics of ES and the nature of change occasioned through their use by human agents within a historically shaped organizational context. Towards this objective, we distinguish ES from other information systems. Implications for practitioners and researchers are presented. <s> BIB009 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <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> BIB010 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> The lack of an agreed upon definition of information system (IS) is one of many obstacles troubling the academic IS discipline. After listing a number of definitions of IS, this paper defines IS as a special case of work system as defined in Alter (1999a). This definition has many desirable characteristics: it is easy to understand; differentiates IS from information technology (IT); covers totally manual, partially automated, and totally automated ISs; links to a life cycle model that generates many insights about development and implementation problems; provides a simple guideline that helps in interpreting common IS/IT jargon; and has other useful implications related to IS concepts, IS terminology, and the analysis and design of ISs. The paper presents the proposed IS definition and evaluates the definition in terms of simplicity, clarity, scope, systematic power, explanatory power, validity, reliability, and fruitfulness. An Appendix summarizes previously published concepts and two frameworks that flow from the proposed definition and are useful for appreciating many points in the evaluation section. <s> BIB011 </s> Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework <s>  <s> Strategic flexibility is a critical organizational competency in today's dynamic global environment. This paper explores the impact of enterprise information systems on an organization's strategic flexibility using the existing strategy and information systems literature to develop a theoretical model. Strategic flexibility is broken down into five first order constructs: operational flexibility; human capital flexibility; information flexibility; supply chain flexibility; and financial flexibility. These constructs are then used to develop a theoretical model and propositions of the impact of enterprise systems on strategic flexibility. <s> BIB012
The above three views imply that the structural or ontological standing of how information systems contribute to organizational agility and the claims or statements that can be made about the relationship between the two needs clear construct definition and further theorization. To address this concern, in this article, we define organizational agility as one of the organizational performance indicators and differentiate it from the IS-enabled sensing and responding capabilities and from the IS competencies that are necessary to build sensing and responding capabilities. Such a structure facilitates developing testable statements of relationships about IS and organizational agility and will allow for knowledge to be accumulated in a systematic manner. Third, prior IS studies on organizational agility use IS-related constructs such as IS competence BIB002 , IT usage and IT acceptance BIB004 , and the quality of the IT infrastructure BIB010 that are too broad and abstract. As such, the IS artifact that the studies refer to is generically defined. For example, enterprise systems (ES) such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) are the most widely used types of information systems and have received a lot of research attention that specifically identifies the challenges, implementation issues, and benefits of such systems BIB008  . Nevertheless, except for anecdotal treatment (see, for example, BIB002 , how enterprise systems either facilitate or inhibit agility remains under-researched. In view of the volume of ES specific studies, a lack of research on ES and organizational agility is a significant oversight that needs to be addressed. Orlikowski and Iacona [2001] stress the importance of specifically defining the IS artifact under investigation to advance the relevance and value of IS research. They caution researchers not to take the IT artifact for granted and advise them to "explicitly theorize about specific technologies with … distinctive computational capabilities … used for certain activities" [Orlikowski and Iacona, 2001, p. 131] . Although some interpret "enterprise systems" as the same as "information systems" and others BIB009 identify a number of distinguishing characteristics of enterprise systems, Alter [2008, p. 458] conjectures that "various types of information systems differ so greatly in form and function that IS in general have few concepts or generalizations in common." He suggests that, in order to understand the true role of information systems, researchers need to specifically and clearly define the IS that they allude to. Given the tradition of ES-specific research, and following Orlikowski and Iacona's [2001] and BIB011 suggestions, in this article we focus on enterprise systems only. Our intention, however, is not to draw distinctions between IS and enterprise systems, but to deeply engage with the unique attributes of enterprise systems that are not necessarily shared by legacy information systems BIB009 in theorizing how organizations can exploit enterprise systems to enable their sensing and responding capabilities and advance agility. ES refer to integrated information systems that use both technology and the management capabilities of that technology to manage information flow in an organization  . Although ES are sometimes viewed as constraining and inflexible, "like cement, highly flexible in the beginning, but rigid later" [Davenport, 2000, p. 16 ], ES such as ERP, CRM, and SCM harness the power of contemporary IT and are pervasively used in most large organizations BIB009 BIB012 . For example, the five-year compound annual growth rate for Enterprise Business Intelligence (BI), CRM, ERP, and SCM Solution Services is expected to be 4.7 percent through 2013  , while the overall ERP application revenue alone was predicted to reach approximately $45.5 billion by 2011  . ES inherit some of the IS characteristics but have unique features such as scope, business logic, complexity, standardization, integration, being process oriented, and continued vendor dependence  BIB009 BIB003 , which results in a distinct contribution toward organizations' performance. Fourth, the sensing and responding processes are interrelated and should be aligned. If organizations are unable to sense effectively, opportunities and threats remain unobserved and disregarded. This will limit organizations' ability to take appropriate actions to respond to the opportunities and threats. Alignment between sensing and responding capabilities enable organizations to effectively capture business opportunities by optimizing organizational resources BIB006 . Moreover, the pressure of change on organizations varies and organizations have different level of agility needs BIB007 BIB001 . Organizations that operate in a dynamic environment require agility more strongly and urgently than organizations that operate in a less turbulent business environment BIB005 . The level of environmental dynamism is dependent on both the sophistication of internal conditions and the turbulence of the external business environment BIB007 . However, existing discourses on IS and organizational agility have overlooked the concepts of the alignment between ES-enabled sensing and responding capabilities and environmental dynamism from the nomological net of factors that explain organizational agility. The above four areas drive this research, which is particularly concerned with ES and their relationship to OA. The first aim of this article is to review the existing literature on IS and OA in general and ES and OA in particular. The second aim of the article is to propose a conceptual framework and set of propositions with clear ontological structures constituted of ES competence, ES-enabled sensing and responding capabilities, alignment between ESenabled sensing and responding capabilities, organizational agility, and environmental dynamism. The main question that the article addresses is: How do organizations exploit ES to become and stay agile? The research bridges the gaps in the IS literature described above regarding the relationship between ES and OA. It also extends the current body of knowledge on ES strategic contribution to organizations. The research also contributes to the IS research, as it provides a clear structural and ontological foundation for IS and organizational agility research. The rest of the article is organized into four sections-research methods, literature review, conceptual framework and proposition development, and conclusion.