A Three-Pronged View on Organizational Agility

Abstract

The ability of organizations to sense and respond to changes—defined as organizational agility—is considered by senior executives among their top information technology (IT) concerns as an important ability for organizations on their quest toward sustained competitive advantage. However, every transformation toward agility also comes at a cost, requiring resource commitment and IT landscape changes. We present examples of successful and unsuccessful attempts at achieving agility while leveraging IT. Our presented cases focus on information systems development agility, customer agility, and entrepreneurial agility. Our findings suggest that agility is neither achieved easily, nor is a guarantor for success. Depending on the context and implementation of organizational agility, however, it can significantly improve process and product performance. We develop a three-pronged view consisting of a functional, temporal, and ambidextrous view to resolve these challenges. We end with three recommendations for practitioners that seek to shape their organization's journey toward agility.