COMPETING PERSPECTIVES ON THE LINK BETWEENSTRATEGIC INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ALIGNMENTAND ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY: INSIGHTS FROM AMEDIATION MODEL

Keterpaduan Teknologi Informasi Strategis dan Ketangkasan Organisasi:

wawasan dari model mediasi

Perspektif bersaing pada hubungan keterpaduan antara teknologi informasi strategis terhadap kecerdikan organisasi : wawasan dari sebuah model perantara

• Setelah melalui perdebatan dan penelitian dalam dua dekade ini, keterpaduan IT strategis, didefinisikan

• At the same time, a marked increase in environmental• volatility due to greater uncertainty in international financial• markets, volatile consumer demand, and rapid product• obsolescence has led firms to consider their ability to respond• to change. Faced with rapid and often unanticipated change,• agility, defined as the ability to detect and respond to opportunities• and threats with ease, speed, and dexterity, has• emerged, next to alignment, as a key business imperative.• Agility has also garnered significant attention from a broad• spectrum of IS researchers (Galliers 2007; Hitt et al. 1998;• Overby et al. 2006; Rai et al. 2006; Sambamurthy et al. 2003;• Weill et al. 2002).3

Conclusion

• with IT investment cycles stretching over extended periods and with long project payback periods, there is an uneasy feeling among executives that certain forms of strategic IT alignment may start to impede agility.

Conclusion

• Our research reveals that alignment is a potent source of value and worthy of the priority status consistently afforded it by top executives (Luftman and Ben-Zvi 2010).

• More importantly, contradicting earlier claims in the IS literature, our results show that firms do not face a tradeoff between nearterm alignment and longer-term agility.

• Strategizing for agility is a useful exercise for firms facing unexpected and potentially disruptive market events (Galliers 2007; Sambamurthy 2000).

• Our results suggest that alignment could become a key part of how firms strategize for and justify agility as part of an attempt to protect and, longer term, to improve their performance.

This research extends the literature on alignment and agility in three specific ways.

• First, in outlining two competing theoretical perspectives that alternately predict a positive or negative link between alignment and agility, we aim to resolve an ongoing debate within the IS literature. Our study provides support for the enabling perspective and, in so doing, provides fresh insights into the relationship between alignment and agility.

• Second, we find that alignment and IT flexibility are equally important predictors of agility.

• While alignment enables executives to find ways for IT to boost agility, IT infrastructure flexibility is what will ultimately implement those ideas.

• Third, we note that agility completely mediates the link between alignment and firm performance, except in volatile settings where agility is found to be a partial mediator.

• This helps explain how and why alignment affects performance.

• While alignment remains a driving force in organizational efforts to improve firm performance, research must take into account the fact that the antecedents of alignment might equally contribute to efforts to enhance agility.