Achieving Organizational Flexibility and Competitive Advantage Through Information Systems Flexibility: A Path Analytic Study

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical study to examine the relationship between IS flexibility, organizational flexibility, and competitive advantage. The study presumes IS usage and organizational learning as the intermediate variables. The study used a questionnaire survey to obtain responses from IS users. The survey was carried out with 296 user-respondents from 42 organizations across eight industrial sectors. For the purpose of gaining more insight into a variable, its dimensions were considered. These dimensions were evolved from the literature. The qualitative scales for the dimensions were explained with a scale table. The scale table was constructed using fuzzy possibility values. Each respondent used this table as a guideline before responding to each item in the questionnaire. The data analysis validates the relationship between IS flexibility, organizational flexibility, and competitive advantage. The results of path analysis confirmed that organizational flexibility and competitive advantage could be achieved through IS flexibility.

Impact of Information Technology Infrastructure Flexibility on the Competitive Advantage of Small and Medium Sized-Enterprises

“…First, based on the definition of "resource" in RBV: ITIF can be an important resource since it could endow a firm with superior cost leadership, quality of product, speed of delivery, and flexibility design, which, in turn, create competitive edge over competitors (Gebauer & Schober, 2006;Palanisamy & Sushil, 2003;Rackoff, Wiseman, & Ullrich, 1985). Second, RBV focuses on "how a firm can achieve diversification by effectively maintaining the balance between the exploitation of existing resources and the exploration of new one."…”

Information System Flexibility and the Cost Efficiency of Business Processes

“…Research efforts have focused on the phenomenon of flexibility (Byrd and Turner, 2000;Sethi and Sethi, 1990), and on the impact of flexible technologies on organizations (Byrd and Turner, 2001;Palanisamy and Sushil, 2003) and organizational processes (Maier, 1981;Stigler, 1939). Throughout the 1970s, researchers conducted substantial amount of empirical works on desirable IS features, including flexibility requirements (Zmud, 1979).…”

Information Systems Flexibility for Green Technologies

“…Many organizations are concerned about the usage of information systems and the absence of it creates no value. Information systems flexibility should ensure Mensah (1989) The ability to respond and adapt to changing business conditions both within and outside the organization Duclos et al (2003) The ability to align information system architectures and systems with the changing information needs of the organization as it responds to changing customer demand Palanisamy and Sushil (2003) The capacity of the information systems to change or to adapt and adjust in response to new conditions, demands, or circumstances from the organization Duncan (1995) IT infrastructure flexibility consist of three components: technological components, flexibility characteristics, and types of indicators Byrd and Turner (2000) Measured IT infrastructure flexibility in terms of technical and human IT infrastructure Gebauer and Schober (2006) Factors/measures for the built-in flexibility of information systems: system functionality, scope of the underlying database, user interface, and processing capacity Michelis et al 1998 Change related issues for information systems arise from three areas of concern: systems, group collaboration, organization and the interactions among them that the effective usage of IT & Systems is maintained or enhanced in an organization. With the rapid changes in environment, new systems and technologies are introduced which comes with an important issue of usage.…”

“…Flexible Information Systems is one of the important elements of Organizational Flexibility and IS should be capable of adapting to new circumstances quickly and inexpensively (Frazelle 1986). Several studies have shown the importance of IS in organizational flexibility (Palanisamy and Sushil 2003;Robey and Boudreau 1999). IS Flexibility should respond to Business Changes and Technological Changes.…”

“…This scale has been adopted from (Palanisamy and Sushil 2003) Out of many important components of organizational flexibility, this paper focuses its study on Information Flexibility. Literature has shown the importance of IS in organizational flexibility and how the role of IS in adopting new circumstances quickly and inexpensively (Frazelle 1986).…”