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Towards an Agile IT Organisation: A Review of Prior Literature

Tommi Tapanainen, Mikko Hallanoro, Johannes Päivärinta, Hannu Salmela, Towards an Agile IT Organisation: A Review of Prior Literature. In: Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation; 11-12 September, 2008; Royal Holloway University of London, 2008.

Abstract:

An abundance of research exists on strategic agility, agile manufacturing systems, and agile software development. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, agility has also been considered as a significant objective for IT organisations. As the penetration of information systems in business operations increases, the ability to sense changes and respond accordingly to changing business requirements is becoming both more difficult and more important. Moreover, IT organisations increasingly need to understand changes affecting the business in order to justify IT investments and current structures. Building agility to IT organisations is not, however, easy. This article reports results from a systematic literature review that collected and classified agility oriented research published in highly ranked IS journals. The review was performed by a four-person team in accordance with the method suggested by Webster and Watson, and focused on the incidence of agility and similar terms in article titles, abstracts, and full text, as well as the articles’ relevance with respect to a commonly used definition of agility. This resulted in a set of 24 articles addressing agility in the context of IT organisations. A characteristic feature in prior studies is that most studies focus on one specific area of the IT organisation. Frameworks that comprise a broader view of prerequisites for agility are almost non-existent. The review suggests a five-point classification of the fields addressed by the reviewed literature, that is, IT organisation structures, IT workforce, IS development processes, IT management and leadership, and IT infrastructure. More importantly, it provides an overall view of variables that have been used in explaining agility in the IT organisation context. Hence, for researchers, the paper provides a first attempt to build a broader theoretical foundation for explaining IT organisation agility. Information systems managers can use the results to identify measures that they can take in order to improve the agility of their own organisations.

BibTeX entry:

@INPROCEEDINGS{inpTaHaPaSa08a,
  title = { Towards an Agile IT Organisation: A Review of Prior Literature},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation; 11-12 September, 2008; Royal Holloway University of London},
  author = {Tapanainen, Tommi and Hallanoro, Mikko and Päivärinta, Johannes and Salmela, Hannu},
  year = {2008},
  keywords = {Agility, Information Systems Development, IT Infrastructure, IS organisation},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Zeta Emerging Technologies

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