IT Infrastructure Agility and Organizational Agility: Instrument Development

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IT Infrastructure Agility and Organizational
Agility Instrument Development

• Lin (Thomas)Ngo-Ye
• linye_at_uwm.edu
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Mujtaba Ahsan
• mahsan_at_pittstate.edu
• Pittsburg State University
• Inaugural Workshop on Enterprise Systems
  Research in Management Information Systems, 10th
  December 2006, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

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Outline

• Introduction
• Research Objectives
• Literature Review
• Methodology
• Conclusion
• Future Work and Theoretical Model

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Introduction

• Purposes
• To better define the IT infrastructure agility
  and organizational agility requirements
  constructs and to develop a valid and reliable
  measurement instruments for these constructs
• Identification of metrics for organizational
  agility and IT infrastructure agility
• To understand the relationship between IT
  infrastructure agility and organizations agility
  requirements

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Background

• Growing interest in agility concept
• Important to understand IT Infrastructure needs
  to be dynamic

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What is Agility

• Agility is defined as the
• Ability to thrive in rapidly changing, fragmented
  markets (Gould, 1997).
• Set of business initiatives an enterprise can
  readily implement (Weill et al. 2002)
• Comprehensive response to the challenges posed by
  a business environment dominated by change and
  uncertainty (Goldmann et al., 1995).

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IT Infrastructure Agility Measures

• Connectivity
• Compatibility
• Modularity (Duncan, 1995)
• IT infrastructure capability (Weill and Vitale,
  1999 Weill and Vitale, 2002 Marchand, Kettinger
  and Rollins, 2000)

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Organization Agility Measures

• Measures
• Customer Agility (C)
• Partnering Agility (P)
• Operational Agility (O)
• Measured on a seven point likert scale with the
  two extremes being Strongly Agree and Strongly
  Disagree

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Measuring IT Customer Agility

• Ability to track environment
• Ability to respond to environment

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Measuring IT Partnering Agility

• Ability to integrate with multiple different
  suppliers
• Ability to communicate decisions/changes to
  suppliers.

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Measuring IT Operational Agility

• Ability to prioritize work accordingly.
• Ability to integrate new processes.

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Methodology (Churchill, 1979)

• DEVELOPMENT OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE AGILITY AND
  ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY REQUIREMENTS CONSTRUCTS
• Defines the domain of the IT infrastructure and
  organizational agility construct
• Operationizes the construct by developing a
  measurement instrument through content analysis
• Pre-test with 9 PhD students generate reliable
  measures
• Field survey and statistical analyses of the data
  gathered from administering the instrument, is
  not included in this paper

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Characteristics of the Architecture Stages Ross
(2003)
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Conclusion

• Developed measures for the IT infrastructure
  agility and organizational agility requirements
  constructs
• Assessed the inter-rater reliabilities of the
  items and found them to be above the satisfactory
  level of 0.65
• Develop agility capability indexes and metrics

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Future Research Model

• Analogy Task-Technology Fit Theory (Goodhue and
  Thompson, 1995)

Organizational Agility Requirements
IT infrastructure agility
Fit
Organizations Overall Performance
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Propositions

• P1a The better the fit between IT infrastructure
  agility and organization agility requirements,
  the better will be the overall performance of the
  organization
• P1b IT infrastructure agility at higher levels
  than organization agility requirements will lead
  to poor organization performance, due to cost
  incurred in developing and maintaining an IT
  infrastructure that is not fully utilized.
• P2 High level of agility will require either a
  rationalized data or a modular architecture.

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The Next Step

• Pilot survey of 5-6 companies.
• Incorporate suggestions.
• Conduct large scale of field survey.

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Future Field Survey

• Organization Agility measures CEO and
  Divisional Managers
• IT Agility measures CIO and Department Leaders
• Mail questionnaires/Email link to Fortune 1000
  companies after establishing phone/email contact.
• Regression Analysis

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Questions or Comments?

• Thank You!