Building and Maintaining Strategic Agility: An Agenda and Framework for Executive IT leaders

Abstract

While much literature on strategic agility has focused on strategic flexibility and adaption at organizational levels, there is a need to provide specific guidance at lower, more discrete levels of analysis. This article focuses on the context of a particular professional group, executive information technology (IT) leaders, who have received attention in recent years for their evolving strategic role at the forefront of firms. It identifies and illustrates a number of practices these actors demonstrate in building and maintaining strategic agility, and it concludes by conceptualizing these practices in an agenda and framework for managers.T his article builds on the growing body of research concerning strategic agility. 1 While existing literature produces insights for organizations to achieve strategic agility, the role that key individuals play in the strategic agility process is under-researched. For example, organizations are advised to generate three high-level capabilities in order to achieve strategic agility: strategic sensitivity, resource fluidity, and leadership unity. 2 Respective examples of these organizational capabilities include allowing collaborative strategic ideation such as by fostering open strategic conversations, dissociating strategy from structure to ensure resources are deployed rapidly, and mutual dependency to avoid political stalemates and personal insecurities at

Organizational agility: ill-defined and somewhat confusing? A systematic literature review and conceptualization

“…The systematic analysis of the literature reveals a shift in the research focus over time. While in earlier times agility as a whole was considered in the enterprise (Gunasekaran 1998(Gunasekaran , 1999Sharifi and Zhang 1999;Yusuf et al 1999;Zhang and Sharifi 2000), in the recent past, the research focus has been more on specific forms of agility, such as workforce agility (Alavi et al 2014;Qin and Nembhard 2010;Sumukadas and Sawhney 2004;Van Oyen et al 2001), supply chain agility (Chen 2019;Eckstein et al 2015;Naim and Gosling 2011), information systems agility (Lyytinen and Rose 2006;Rabah et al 2015), and strategic agility (Doz and Kosonen 2011;Fourné et al 2014;Lewis et al 2014;Morton et al 2018;Shin et al 2015;Weber and Tarba 2014). However, the research fails to consider how the various forms of agility in the enterprise then work together to increase the overall agility level of the organization.…”

A Self‐Tuning Model for Smart Manufacturing SMEs: Effects on Digital Innovation

“…Specifically, those SMEs that effectively leverage ICT technologies can be agile despite facing challenges in maintaining this status (Morton, Stacey, and Mohn, 2018). This occurs because they seek to change quickly and to co‐evolve with their ecosystems, which demands constant and continuous adjustments in increasing knowledge convergence, market sensitivity, and fluidity in resource picking (Wilson and Doz, 2011).…”

Perspectives

“…This paper (Morton et al, 2018) is unusual in a number of respects. The first is that the authors are European rather than coming from a US IT strategy perspective and further than of the authors is the senior director in a German financial services business.…”