Enterprise Systems and Organizational Agility: A Review of the Literature and Conceptual Framework

The impact of enterprise systems (ES) on organizational agility (OA) is an under-researched area. Given that most organizations are heavily investing on ES infrastructure and the increasing demand for agility, the lack of research on ES and OA is a critical oversight. This article reviews previous literature on information systems in general and ES in particular and organizational agility. The article offers a comprehensive and deepened perspective toward the existing discourses on ES-enabled organizational agility. Using insights from the dynamic capability theory, we propose a conceptual framework that highlights how organizations can exploit ESs to improve their agility in two significant ways―by creating and constantly developing an ES-enabled sensing and responding capability. We also argue that the quality of the ES competence provides the necessary technical and business platform for deploying and exploiting ES in building and rebuilding sensing and responding capabilities. The proposed framework sheds light on three important missing factors in the realm of IT-enabled organizational agility, namely ES competency, the alignment between ES-enabled sensing and responding capability, and environmental dynamism. Our theorizing makes an original contribution to ES and IS research by extending previous works of IT-enabled organizational agility by introducing the three constructs previously mentioned.