Dimensions of Organizational Agility in the Software and IT Service Industry – Insights from an Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Abstract:Agility has increasingly gained attention in the software and IT services industry over the last years and academia put a heavy emphasis on research about agile software development methods. However, an organization does not only comprise development teams, and research often lacks an organizational perspective on agility. Presently, we have no consensus about what constitutes an "agile organization". Hence, in this study, I identify the structure behind the concept of organizational agility using an exploratory research approach. I conducted a survey among organizations in the software and IT service industry and performed an, exploratory factor analysis and a cluster analysis (based on the variables). The results show that one can describe organizational agility using six interrelated factors that one can further aggregate into the three basic dimensions of "agility prerequisites", "agility of people", and "structures enhancing agility". The identified structure is a first step toward a common understanding of organizational agility and helps to guide further research activities while simultaneously supporting practitioners in assessing the agility of their organizations.

Impact of Organizational Culture Values on Organizational Agility

“…Therefore, the effectiveness of dynamic capabilities in companies is context dependent, although limited information is available on the joint effect of the internal and external mechanisms of organizations [15]. This paper has considered OC to be an antecedent of OA but the acceptance of agile values and principles can also be strongly influenced by environmental factors [11]. Considering technology intensity as one of the most relevant contingent variables in terms of organizational conditions [16], it is proposed as one of these external variables that may moderate the effects between OC in the firm and the OA level.…”

“…This field has mainly addressed the influence of IS and their related capabilities (ISC) in the achievement of high levels of OA in firms [4,11].…”

“…The impact of cultural values and principles in the OA level is influenced by a complex set of factors that includes not only internal but environmental factors [11]. This paper proposes that the impact of the different types of OC values on OA may be moderated by one of these environmental variables, the technology intensity of the industry.…”

Challenges and Solutions of Applying Large-Scale Agile at Organization-al Level

“…Most papers deal with the topic either on individual dimension or they are not very specific. Moreover, the researches that deal explicitly with applying agile in large organization often overlook the organizational context and only several papers explicitly used an organizational perspective [5], [6], [7]. This layout increases the difficulty of making a clear classification of the existing streams of research.…”

“…The majority of literature treats the subject of large-scale agile implementation at the individual level or not very specific. Only a few papers have explicitly assumed an organization perspective when analyzing agile adoption at large [5], [6], [7]. Also, through our literature review, we have found that some papers mention that they deal with agile issues in large organization, but their approach and results are focused on agile for large software project or large-scale agile development [8] or a mixed of those with large organization perspective [6].…”