How Enterprises Adopt Agile Forms of Organizational Design

Abstract

The question of how to increase speed and flexibility in times of digital disruption is essential to almost any company. While previous research mainly addresses agility in the context of information systems development, as form for organizing startups or "born digital" companies, little knowledge exists about the adoption of agile practices and structures at established enterprises. With an exploratory study of fifteen global cases, we aim at examining how established enterprises adopt and scale agile forms of organizational design. We found that (1) agile forms of organizational design are currently adopted by enterprises at large scale, (2) agile forms of organizational design are adopted not only by IT, but successively also by business units and in contexts outside information systems development, and (3) while Spotify's organization serves as a widespread template for a fully agile unit, enterprises adapt and fine-tune this template according to their needs and scale. We identified three additional models for fully agile forms of organizational design where a fully agile unit with cross-product support is the most frequently observed model.