Agile Information Systems
Introduction
Change is the rule of the game in the current business environment. Not only are the changes occurring at an increasing rate, they are becoming increasingly unpredictable. This unpredictability can involve when a known change will occur, what an unknown change will look like, or the combination of these. The rapid rate of change implies that an organization needs to become an expert at changing and morphing itself rapidly in response to a change. As per the ORACLE cloud agility survey [1] the ability of the competitor to launch innovative services more rapidly was identified as a top threat by 27% of the respondents. Also, as per the survey, a majority of businesses believe they are agile but cannot flexibly manage workloads or rapidly develop, test, and launch new applications, leaving them poorly prepared to deal with competitive threats. Retention of leadership and/or competitive position requires that an organization should be able to change at will in any direction, without significant cost and time, to counter a threat or capitalize on an opportunity. Such an organization may be characterized as an agile organization.
Literature Review
Peer-reviewed academic literature alludes to several benefits of IS agility. While the authors clearly distinguish between flexibility and agility [11] , the published literature often does not make this distinction and hence pertinent literature from both areas is examined. Also literature from other areas like supply chain management and manufacturing (which was and is at the forefront of the agility phenomenon) is also examined.
Based on the Resource-Based View (RBV) of the firm, we consider IS as a key resource of a firm. Even though many systems can be purchased from the marketplace, the use and customization of these systems is recognized as anchoring the IS competencies of the firm. [18] [19] view IS infrastructure as an IS competence, because not all the firms can equally capitalize on information technology (IT) without using a flexible IS infrastructure. Firm competencies inherit the following properties: they are valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable. These attributes cannot be easily imitated by competitors in the short-run because capabilities are deeply rooted in the history of the firm, and some capabilities could arise just by being in the right place at the right time [20] . Agility of an IS would further enhance an organization’s competitive advantage.
Research Approach and Objectives
IS agility is an area where practitioners have taken the lead. In the practitioner literature, IS agility is equated to a set of technologies that enable seamless interconnection and collaboration between the IT components to achieve rapid configuration changes. The conceptualization of IS agility used in this study is much broader and more comprehensive in scope. To arrive at the benefits of an agile IS, a comprehensive survey of the practitioner literature was done. This included having Google alerts for the topic and continually refining the benefits. In addition, existing literature on agility was also examined to arrive at a list of benefits of an agile IS. Specifically, the following steps were taking to arrive at a list of benefits:
v Arrive at a conceptualized set of benefits of an agile IS. Such benefits would arise due to the ability of an IS to respond to internal, organizational, and external changes through sensing a change in real-time, diagnosing the change in real-time, and selecting and executing a response in real-time (Pankaj, 2005).
v Verify and refine the conceptualized set of benefits of an agile IS based on the feedback from practitioners and to arrive at a comprehensive set of benefits.
v Validate the benefits through a survey.
v 4. Perceived Benefits of an Agile IS
As stated earlier benefits due to the ability of an agile IS to sense, diagnose, and select and respond in real-time are based on the comprehensive and continual review of the practitioner literature as well as published academic literature. The agility literature describes the benefits of agility as ranging from survival to enhancement of the competitive position. Since an agile IS contributes to the agility of an organization, the benefits of IS agility may span a similar range. The net effect of IS agility would be on the financial performance of the organization but it may have several other immediate or first order effects like reduction in the time needed for changing IS, etc. Table 1 gives a list of benefits of an agile IS from the classical agility literature. It may be noted that most of these are higher order benefits. For the purpose of this manuscript, the focus is on first order benefits to
Improving and Refining the Benefits of an Agile IS
Ten executives were interviewed to elicit their opinions on the benefits of an agile IS. The interviews were comprehensive in the sense that they were introduced to the definition of IS agility, asked to validate it, comment on it, and discuss it, and then asked to comment on the attributes of an agile IS (published elsewhere). Subsequent to that they were asked about the benefits of an agile IS outlined in Table 2. They were requested to modify, add, and delete to and from the list. They were also requested to give a balanced perspective on different aspects of an agile IS ranging from organizational rules and policies to IT components. As per Bonoma’s verification guidelines [46] , multiple interviews were proposed for purposes of literal replication. The interviewees selected were participants in a discussion round table for a research center in a major university. The participants’ organizations/companies were examined by the participating researchers and were deemed to have a need for IS agility based on an informal assessment of the antecedents of IS agility for these organizations [10] .
Survey Development & Administration
Survey development and administration was performed using the well-docu- mented steps for survey development, administration and analysis [47] [48] [49] [50] . The development and validation of the survey was performed as per the guidelines by Churchill [51] : generate sample items, pilot test, and develop final measures.