Barriers to Agility in a Large Company's IT Organization

Introduction

The contemporary dynamic business environment pose new challenges for information technology (IT) organizations’ who need to be fast, nimble and flexible while still having stable operations with high control and low costs (Gerth & Rothman, 2007). The ability to detect and respond to change with ease, speed, flexibility and dexterity is referred to as agility, also called “…the dominant competitive vehicle for all organizations in an uncertain and ever-changing business environment…” (Tseng & Lin, 2011, p. 3694). Companies’ are increasingly dependent on IT and the demands from the business is changing fast (Tapanainen et al., 2008) Therefore, the IT organization itself need to operate with agility so that it can facilitate IT changes to the business in a fast and flexible manner (Tapanainen et al., 2008). The concept of agility can be applied to any type of function or organization and have gained great interest from researchers and practitioners in several different fields such as manufacturing, logistics and information systems /information technology. In a study done by Kappelman et al. (2017) agility is ranked as a top ten IT organizational management issue and is generally noted as a big concern for IT organizations in today’s companies. Agility has been associated with being an especially troublesome endeavor for large enterprises (Baker, 2006; Stettina & Hörz, 2015; Kappelman et al., 2017). While prior research within the IS field have focused on agility in many different ways, agility in terms of software development and IT infrastructure have gained the most attention (Salmela et al., 2015). Moreover, the research on agility within IT and how IT organizations can attain agility is often isolated to a certain sub-area of IS (i.e., software development) (Salmela et al., 2015). Hence, the growth of knowledge in scientific research about agility is characterized as being in silos (DeSouza, 2007; Salmela et al., 2015). The siloes research enables detailed exploration in specific areas of the IT organization but leaves a lack of research taking a holistic view of agility within IT organizations, where the concept is studied in an integrated and holistic manner (DeSouza, 2007; Salmela et al., 2015). Therefore, we argue that there is a gap in prior research on agility that considers all constituents of the IT organization. This gap, and need for a holistic understanding of IT organizational agility, has been highlighted by for example Nurdiani et al. (2014) and Salmela et al. (2015). Thus, IT organization agility need an empirical and holistic exploration to aid further research in this area in order to provide a more comprehensive view of agility within IT organizations in the future.