Enterprise systems and organisational agility: developing and exploring a causal model
Creators: name: Trinh, Phuong Thao
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024

description: Organisational agility (OA) refers to an organisation’s ability to compete and thrive in an unstable business environment by quickly detecting and seizing opportunities. A number of previous researchers have investigated the factors, processes and strategies that contribute to OA. Of these areas, the role of information systems (IS) in general and enterprise systems (ES) such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) in particular is of interest to this thesis.<br><br>Contemporary organisations depend on their ES, cannot survive or grow without ES support, and are investing to build their ES infrastructure to improve performance. Despite the pervasiveness of ES, their impact on OA is under-researched. Given that most organisations are investing heavily in ES and the increasing demand for agility, the lack of research on ES and OA is a critical oversight. This research aims to address the question of how ES enables OA. The objectives of the study were (1) to investigate the role of ES and (2) to explore the mechanisms of how ES influences OA.<br><br>Previous literature on IS in general and ES in particular and OA are reviewed. The thesis offers a comprehensive and deepened perspective on the existing discourses on ES-enabled OA. Using insights from dynamic capability theory, a conceptual framework is proposed. The framework highlights how organisations can exploit ES to improve their agility in two significant ways―by creating and constantly developing ES-enabled sensing (ESS) and responding (ESR) capabilities. 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.<br><br>The development of the research model followed a rigorous research design which included theoretical and operational definitions of the constructs, identification of appropriate methods of data collection and refining the measurements by pretesting and a pilot study. The proposed model was tested in a large-scale field survey. Data were collected from 179 medium and large organisations in Australia and New Zealand that have implemented and been using ES for at least a year. The data were analysed in a two-stage structural modelling procedure using SPSS and PLS.<br><br>The theoretical and empirical results show that organisations can achieve agility out of their ES investment in three ways: (1) by developing an ES for technical, human, managerial, vendor, and functional competences; (2) by exploiting their ES competences to build ES-enabled capabilities that digitise their sensing and responding processes; and (3) when ESS and ESR are aligned. The results shed light on three important missing factors in the realm of IT-enabled OA, namely ES competency, the alignment between ESS and ESR capabilities, and environmental dynamism.<br><br>This research makes an original contribution to theory and practice through its development and validation of a theoretical model. Specifically, the research uncovers the mechanism by which ES impacts OA by explicitly theorising ES-induced competencies that may be exploited to develop distinctive ESS and ESR to enable OA. The research also provides a number of implications for practitioners on how they can successfully manage their ES to advance OA level.<br>