The ability of information systems development project teams to respond to business and technology changes: a study of flexibility measures

Abstract

The socio-technical perspective suggests that information systems development projects (ISDPs) involve both organizational and technical dimensions. As both the organizational and technical aspects of ISDPs frequently change, the ISDP team's flexibility in responding to these changes has become a critical success factor for system development. While the importance of ISDP team flexibility has increased, the research literature lacks a consistent definition and validated measures of the construct. Drawing upon the socio-technical and the capability-based perspectives and using a systematic multi-stage approach, we identified major business and technology changes and developed measurement scales of ISDP team flexibility along two dimensions: Response Extensiveness and Response Efficiency. The results of a confirmatory factor analysis using survey data from 505 ISDP managers suggested that the final measurement scales exhibited adequate levels of measurement properties including unidimensionality, reliability, discriminant validity, factorial invariance and nomological validity. In addition, our results revealed an interesting negative relationship between Response Extensiveness and Response Efficiency, indicating a trade-off between the two dimensions of flexibility. Our result indicated that while the ISDP teams experienced and responded more extensively to business changes than technology changes, they were much less efficient in dealing with business changes than technology changes.