Attributes-for-Executing-Change-in-an-Agile-Infor

ABSTRACTInformation Systems (IS) agility is a current topic of interest in the IS industry. The study follows up on work on the definition of the construct of IS agility and attributes for sensing and diagnosis in an agile IS. IS agil-ity is defined as the ability of an IS to sense a change in real time; diagnose it in real time; and select and execute an action in real time. This paper explores the attributes for selecting and executing a response in an Agile Information System. A set of attributes were initially derived using the practitioner literature and then refined using interviews with practitioners. The attributes’ importance and validity was established using a survey of the industry. All attributes derived in this study were deemed pertinent for selecting and executing a change in an agile information system. Dimensions underlying these attributes were identified using Exploratory Factor Analysis. This list of attributes can form the basis for assessing and establishing execution mechanisms to increase IS Agility.Attributes for Executing Change in an Agile Information System Pankaj Chaudhary, Eberly College of Business and Information Technology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, P A, USAMicki Hyde, Eberly College of Business and Information Technology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, P A, USAJames A Rodger, Eberly College of Business and Information Technology, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, P A, USAKeywords: Agile Information Systems, Execution Attributes, Information Systems Agility, Response Execution, Response Selection, Selection AttributesINTRODUCTIONChange is the rule of the game in the current business environment. The rate of change has been continuously increasing due to factors like globalization and the opportunities presented by the development and evolution of technologies. Not only are changes occurring at an increasing rate, they are becoming increasingly unpredict-able. This unpredictability can involve the tim-ing of a known change; not knowing about a change; and/or a combination of these. T he rapidrate of change implies that an organization needs to become an expert at changing and morphing itself rapidly in response to a change. Reten-tion of leadership and/or competitive position requires that an organization should be able to change at will in any direction, with minimal cost and time, to counter a threat or capitalize on an opportunity. Such an organization may be characterized as an agile organization. For most organizations the survival and/or retention of market share demands that the organizationDOI: 10.4018/IJTD.2015040103should be able to change faster than, or as fast as, new entrants and rivals.Information Systems (IS) pervade all aspects of modern organizational functioning and play an integral role in information process-ing activities of an organization. Information Systems are needed for organizational agility on account of their ability to provide shared, distributed and integrated, current, and fast-flowing information (Bajgoric, 2000; Bal, Wilding, & Gundry, 1999; Christopher, 2000; Hoek, 2000; Mason-Jones & Towill, 1999; Sharifi & Zhang, 1999; Y. Y. Yusuf, Sarahadi, & Gunasekaran, 1999).Modern business processes in organiza-tions use IS as a core resource or component. In many and most cases, IS may completely or significantly embed a business process (e.g., Internet banking). The pivotal role of IS in modern organizational business processes means that an organization (agile or striving to be) cannot change its business processes unless the IS changes as well. Thus an agile organization would need an agile IS. What Brandt and Boynton indicated in 1993 still holds true - current IS are not easy to change though several are getting closer in some as-pects. Markets change but IS do not. Though more organizations are experimenting with Agile Development methods, most IS have been developed and are still being built to cover a closed/defined set of requirements using the waterfall development methodology, especially in contracting and outsourcing arrangements. The performance of an IS is also optimized for these requirements. The result of this opti-mization is that IS changes are often arduous and complicated, especially in cases where the requirements were not explicitly foreseen by the designers. But such requirements are frequent in today’s environment. The problems in changing an IS are further aggravated by other factors such as outsourcing, where the knowledge about the architectural and techni-cal aspects of IS may primarily reside outside the organization. The inability of IS to change quickly impedes organizational agility. The challenge for an organization is to structure its IS to meet a variety of changing requirements, many of which are not even known when the IS are built. In summary, an agile organization needs an agile IS.So what is an agile IS? We arrive at the definition or construct of an agile IS based on prior work done by the authors in this area. Agility in general is defined (Pankaj, 2005; Pankaj, Hyde, Ramaprasad, & Tadisina, 2009) as a formative construct comprised of the ability to sense a change, diagnose a change, select a response, and execute the response in real-time:1. Sense: Ability to sense the stimuli forchange (as they occur) in real-time;2. Diagnose: Ability to interpret or analyzestimuli in real-time to determine the nature, cause, and impact of change;3. Respond:A bility to respond to a change inreal-time, further disaggregated into selectand execute.3.1. S elect: Ability to s elect a response inreal-time (very short planning time)needed to capitalize on the opportunityor counter the threat.3.2. E xecute: Ability to execute the re-sponse in real-time.Real-time is defined as the span of time in which the correctness of the task performed not only depends upon the logical correctness of the task performed but also upon the time at which the result is produced. If the timing constraints of the system are not met, system failure is said to have occurred (Unknown, 2002).Thus an Agile IS may be defined as one that has the ability to sense a change in real-time, diagnose the change in real-time, select a response in real-time, and execute the response in real-time. Due to the formative nature of the construct, several, or some, of these abilities might exist in the absence of others.This paper is organized starting with a definition of the formative construct of an “Agile IS” and the construct’s components: Sense, Diagnose, and Select and Execute. The Introduction is followed by a Literature Review and general discussions of Information Systemsand Sources of Change in Information Systems to provide context for the following analysis and results. The Research A pproach and Objectives of the paper are discussed followed by a con-ceptualized set of attributes for Selecting and Executing a Response to a Change in an Agile IS. These attributes are verified and refined and then validated through an empirical analysis of a survey. The Survey A dministration, A nalysis, and Results are offered followed by the Sum-mary, Comments, and Limitations.LITERATURE REVIEWBased on the review of the current peer-reviewed academic work there appear to be few studies addressing the topic of IS agility and/or agile IS directly. Many studies have explored the concept of flexible IS, and agility in other aspects of the organizations. It should be noted that flex-ibility is a related, though different and distinct, concept (Pankaj et al., 2009). Flexibility does not imply agility but can aid in agility (Pankaj et al., 2009). This section summarizes some studies in the area of flexibility and agility in relation to IS.A flexible IS infrastructure allows sharing of data and applications through communica-tion networks. It pertains to the arrangement of hardware, software, and networks so that data and applications can be accessed and shared within and between suppliers, customers, and vendors (Broadbent, Weil, & St.Clair, 1999).A flexible IS infrastructure helps in integrating disparate and geographically distributed sys-tems and makes IS applications cost effective in their operations and supports. Therefore, a flexible infrastructure becomes a critical source of advantage to the firm. In both academics and industry, “companies increasingly adopt process-aware information systems (PAISs), which offer promising perspectives for more flexible enterprise computing” (Weber, Reichert, & Rinderle-Ma, 2008). Gottfried and Herwig (Gottfried & Herwig, 2014) believe that recent economic developments indicate that greater flexibility in manufacturing is more important than ever and they present an applicable approach that shows exactly how to evaluate the manufacturing flexibility and how to measure an improvement of flexibility in business practice. A flexible IS infrastructure is an integrated shared system that is built piece by piece over time (Bharadwaj, 2000). That means, as a firm learns to work with a system and gradually becomes proficient in using the system, it continually works to add other pieces in the infrastructure that can set it apart from other firms.Based on the Resource-Based View (RBV) of the firm, we consider IS as a key resource of a firm. Even though many systems can be purchased from the marketplace, the use and customization of these systems is recognized as anchoring the IS competencies of the firm. (Ex., Bharadwaj 2000; and Rockart, et al. 1996) view IS infrastructure as an IS competence, because not all the firms can equally capitalize on information technology (IT) without using a flexible IS infrastructure. Firm competencies inherit the following properties: they are valu-able, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable. These attributes cannot be easily imitated by competitors in the short-run because capabilities are deeply rooted in the history of the firm, and some capabilities could arise just by being in the right place at the right time (Barney, 1991).It can be argued that Business Process Management (BPM) practices continue to gain interest among managers who seek to improve their organization’s efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and competitive position (Goeke & Antonucci, 2013). The knowledge-based or-ganization must be agile and apply substantial knowledge, when and where it’s needed, to affect organizational goals (Nissen, 2005). A model proposed by Hefu, et al. (Hefu, Weil-ing, Kwok, & Zhongsheng, 2013) proposes to examine how IT capabilities (i.e., flexible IT infrastructure and IT assimilation) affect firm performance through absorptive capacity and supply chain agility in the supply chain context (Hefu, Weiling, Kwok, & Zhongsheng, 2013). Their research shows that absorptive capacity and supply chain agility fully mediate the influ-ences of IT capabilities on firm performance.A conceptual framework developed and empirically tested by Yang (Yang, 2014) inves-tigates the antecedents of manufacturers supply chain agility and posits that cost efficiency mediates the relationship between agility and performance (Yang, 2014).Given the nature of collaboration and the high degree of interoperability between partner IS, processes need to be agile in order to respond to changes in context; to apply agil-ity mechanisms; and to detect the significant events that will lead to a subsequent evolution of the situation and to design the structure of the part of the system that is in charge of IS agility (Anne-Marie, Sébastien, Frédérick, & Hervé, 2014).Organizational workers improve their perceived job performance through the use of Mobile Enterprise Systems (MES), while also investigating the impact of perceived orga-nizational agility and location independence on technology acceptance of MES (Sunghun, Kyung, & Kimin, 2014). Organizational agility is positively associated with both perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness (Sunghun et al., 2014).The link between dimensions of agile supply chains, competitive objectives, and busi-ness performance was assessed by Yusuf, et al. (Yahaya Y. Yusuf et al., 2014). They identify the most important dimensions and attributes of supply chain agility and provide a deeper insight into those characteristics of agility that are most relevant.A cross-sectional field study was employed to analyze how key defining features of enter-prise systems environment, including integra-tion, process optimization, and best practices affect agility (Seethamraju & Sundar, 2013).In summary, there are studies addressing different aspects of flexibility and agility in an organization. This study addresses IS agility as a distinct concept in an explicit and direct RMATION SYSTEMSIS in this study are restricted to computer-based information systems and we categorize IS com-ponents into human and IT components (Byrd & Turner, 2000) operating within an organizational context (please refer to Figure 1). This is a sim-plistic conceptualization of an IS by the authors and is used in this research to put a boundary around the domain of interest, since IS in their holistic view can be all encompassing. Several alternative ways of classifying components, such as having a database component and/or including storage in hardware, is possible. Each has its own merits and advantages.The organizational context for an IS may be described in different ways depending upon the purpose of the research question. Conceptu-alization of the organizational context is based on the work of Ein-Dor and Segev (Ein-Dor & Segev, 1978). Organizational context may be viewed as a combination of uncontrollable, partially controllable, and controllable factors. Uncontrollable factors are those whose status is given with respect to IS and include organi-zational size, organizational structure, organi-zational time-frames, and extra-organizational situations. The partially controllable factors are those whose change can be affected by the IS in many situations like organizational resources, organizational maturity, and the psychological climate in the organization. Controllable factors are those for which changes can be affected by the IS like rank and location of the top IS executives, and existence of a steering commit-tee. Organizational policies and rules also play an important part as they control and guide all organizational actions and imperatives.The human component of IS consists of the IS staff responsible for planning, develop-ment, operation, and maintenance of the IS. The human IS component should have four types of knowledge and skills. These are technology management knowledge and skills; business and functional knowledge and skills; interpersonaland management skills; and technical knowl-edge and skills (Lee, Trauth, & Farwell, 1995).The IT component consists of the comput-ing, storage (including databases with the data model and other data), and networking equip-ment, and software that runs on this equipment. The absence of data as an explicit component may be seen as an issue. The rationale for not providing data as an explicit component is that data is a contextual component rather than an independent component and can be subsumed in software and storage. The logic of the business processes is embedded into the configuration of IT components. The human component of the IS is responsible for embedding or program-ming this logic and associated data into the IT components.SOURCES OF CHANGE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMSIS need to change continuously. There are several motivators/causes for an IS change. IS may change on account of internal changes, organizational changes, and/or environmental changes. IS form the core of information pro-cessing in all modern organizations. An IS has to continuously improve its performance to improve organizational performance, thus re-quiring continuous changes. Such changes to the IS that emanate from considerations within the IS itself, are termed as internal changes in this study. In modern organizations, IS and business processes are tightly coupled (Edwards, Millea, Mcleod, & Coults, 1998). Business processes have to change in response to changes in the organization’s strategy and its short-term and medium-term choices. A change in the business process will require a change in the IS. Con-versely, an IS’s ability to change may permit or prohibit changes in business processes. An IS has to change to enable changes in business processes. Such changes in IS that are driven by the organization, are termed as organizational changes.Environmental changes may impact an IS directly and warrant change. Issues such as technical compatibility with suppliers, custom-ers, and other partners; termination of support for obsolete technologies; upgrade of the hard-ware and software products; increase in viruses and cyber-attacks; changes in licensing terms; etc. pose a requirement for changes in IS. Such changes are termed as environmental changes. These are primarily driven by the changes in the environment that directly and exclusively affect the IS. These would exclude the changes that are mediated through the organization.Figure 1. A model of information systemsRESEARCH APPROACHAND OBJECTIVESThough there is a lot of discussion of agility in the current practitioner literature, theories in the area of IS agility are in early formative stages (see (Eisenhardt, 1989) for theory building). IS agility is also an area where practitioners have taken the lead. In the practitioner literature, IS agility is equated to a set of technologies that enable seamless interconnection and collabora-tion between the IT components to achieve rapid configuration changes. The conceptualization of IS agility as proposed in this study is much broader and more comprehensive in scope. This study therefore aims to fulfill the follow-ing objectives:1. Arrive at a conceptualized set of attributesfor selecting and executing a response toa change in an agile IS. (Work on sensingattributes (Pankaj, Hyde, & Rodger, 2013b) and diagnosis attributes (Pankaj, Hyde, & Rodger, 2013a) has been presented sepa-rately due to length considerations).2. Verify and refine the conceptualized setof attributes for selecting and executinga response to change in an agile IS basedon the feedback from practitioners and to arrive at a comprehensive set of attributes selecting and executing a response for IS agility3. Validate the attributes for selecting andexecuting a response in an agile IS as con-ceptualized in this study provided througha survey.RESPONSE SELECTION AND EXECUTION IN AN AGILE INFORMATION SYSTEM Sensing means that relevant signals are received and the information on the level/measure of parameter(s) with which the signal is concerned, is recorded. Signals come from everywhere (Quinn, 1980). IS employs a wide variety of sensors that include machines, living entities, and social entities to sense the stimuli. An agile IS has several attributes (Pankaj et al., 2013b) for sensing a change in real-time. Sensing a change is an important ability. After a change is sensed it has to be diagnosed.Given that the stimuli have been sensed accurately and in a timely fashion, an accurate and timely diagnosis is needed. The diagnosis provides answers to questions like what is the change, where is it occurring, when has it occurred or will occur, who is affected by the change, and what is the cause of the change. Former Intel chairman Andy Grove (Grove, 1999) argued that this is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks that an organization faces. Recognizing whether a change has happened or is going to happen is a non-trivial task. An important objective of the diagnosis is to dis-tinguish signal from noise. Stimuli need to be interpreted to determine the nature and cause of change. Diagnosis of the change in an agile IS takes additional importance since most modern IS are fairly complex. This complex-ity often makes it difficult to infer the linkages between cause and effect. Inference of cause is necessary to arrive at a response to the change. For a modern IS, what the change is and why it is happening are the minimal answers needed from diagnosis. There are several attributes that enable an agile IS to diagnose in real-time (Pankaj et al., 2013a).Once a change has been diagnosed, a response is selected. This response may range from doing nothing to a complete reengineering or replacement of the existing IS. The primary criterion for arriving at a response in agility is execution within the time constraints (real-time). For this reason a quick patch job that meets the time constraints may be preferred when compared to an exceptionally effective and sound rational response that is late. Addi-tional criteria for a response are cost of change, scope of change, and robustness of change (Dove, 1994). These additional constraints may be used if several responses satisfy the time constraints. Together these four constraintsconstitute the core criteria for selection of a response and may subsume other constraints. For instance, constraints on time and cost will help in choosing between the alternatives of outsourcing vs. in-house development; con-straint on robustness will help in choosing between use of new technologies (with higher probability of instability and bugs) vs. trusted old technologies; etc. An agile IS chooses a response that can be executed within the given time constraint, with minimum cost, maximum scope, and maximum robustness. Time in an agile IS is the primary constraint.Execution of the response within the given constraints is contingent upon the resources available for execution which in turn depends upon the accuracy of the estimation of resource requirements and constraints (sometimes still an art) during the response selection. The selec-tion process itself may be short at most times to meet the real-time constraints and may not involve exhaustive attention to details, thus cutting down the planning time during selec-tion. This, coupled with complexity associated with IS changes, may result in unforeseen contingencies during execution. An agile IS should be able to resolve these contingencies within the given time constraints. This may pose the need for having viable alternatives when selecting and executing a response. For example, if an application cannot be developed in-house then it may be outsourced. In the worst case scenario, it may be necessary to start the cycle of sense, diagnose, select, and execute again by seeking additional stimuli while still staying within the original time constraints. An agile IS has alternatives for the execution of a chosen response, and also has alternative responses for a given change. An agile IS has properties like loose coupling of components with standard interfaces; flexibility in the techni-cal components to be reconfigured, scaled, and reused; multi-skilled human resources, etc.; that allow for alternative executions of a response and/or execution of a different response within the given constraints.ATTRIBUTES FOR RESPONSE SELECTION AND EXECUTION IN AN AGILE IS The human and IT components of an agile IS have several attributes which allows the IS to select and respond to internal, organizational, and environmental changes in real-time. These changes may affect the human or IT compo-nents or bothDue to paucity of the peer-reviewed academic literature, most attributes have been derived from a survey of practitioner literature (about 250 in number) and the consulting experi-ences of the authors. Some academic articles in the area of IS flexibility were also referenced (e.g. (Allen & Boynton, 1991; Weil, Subramani, & Broadbent, 2002)).Attributes for Response Selection in an Agile ISOne of the attributes needed in an agile IS for the selection of a response is good estimation skills for evaluation of responses for satisfac-tion of the given constraints. The IS staff should be able to rate the available responses on the four constraints of time, cost, robustness, and scope with confidence so that a few responses may be selected. A prerequisite to estimation is an accurate assessment of the capabilities of the IS organization in terms of controllable, partially controllable, and uncontrollable fac-tors so that only feasible/viable responses are selected. IS staff leading projects and tasks should have an accurate knowledge of these factors for accurate estimation. Formal methods of estimation (e.g. COCOMO, COCOMO II, Function Point Analysis) may be used within the IS function for estimation (Pendharkar, Subramanian, & Rodger, 2005). Human experi-ence may be used exclusively or complement formal methods. Many times access to the knowledge-bases external to the organizations like those of the IT vendors and others (Kris & Jan, 2010) may be needed during estimation for the purpose of effort-estimation and sizing of the IS components (number of processorsin the server, number of people needed in the implementation, etc.).Often it may not be possible to select a response that fulfills all the constraints (in-cluding those posed by IS) by only altering the IS. In many such cases a small change in the business processes, rules, and/or policies, can yield a response that fulfills all the given constraints. This attribute is necessary since the traditional wisdom in the MIS area is for an IS to conform to business process requirements. IS-driven changes in business processes are often seen as problematic by most executives since there is a perception that such changes are devoid of any good business logic and seek to fulfill only technical goals. Thus IS should possess the capability to influence the organi-zational context by driving limited changes in business processes, rules, and policies to the extent where justification for such change can be provided. We focus on these three factors for the sake of parsimony. But the capability as to what factors in the organizational context can be changed, and the extent to which they can be changed, would depend upon the perceived necessity of the IS change. The attributes of agile IS relevant to the selection of a response are described in Table 1.Attributes for Executing a Response in an Agile IS Execution in this study is defined as the creation of a new configuration in IS using the IT com-ponents and the IS staff such that the selected response is incorporated as a functionality of this IS configuration. The IS configuration may be created by altering the existing IT components and staff, adding on new IT components and staff, or both. These new configurations include alternatives like application services providers, outsourcing, co-location in third party data cen-ters, and “computing on demand” (all of these collectively subsume cloud computing) being offered by various vendors like IBM, Google, Amazon, RackSpace, etc. These alternatives may also be used in conjunction with the re-configuration of the in-house IS functionality within the organization. Execution in an agile IS should meet the constraints by creating the IS configuration within the time and cost with the requisite robustness and scope. The resulting configuration should be stable. This is an impor-tant point to stress since the distributed nature of the current IS, coupled with the number of components and their complexity increases the number of failure points significantly. Execu-tion should also allow for alternative methods of execution of the same response and ability to switch to an alternative response during a contingency.IT components in general should have properties that allow for rapid execution. Re-usable, scalable, and rapidly reconfigurable modular components may allow for rapid ex-ecution (Dove, 1995). Several attributes of the IS components facilitate reconfiguration. The IT components should scale, implying that it should be possible to add a similar IT component to an existing component to obtain an increase in capacity. Most IT components scale at a rate that is below linear and hence, the closer the scaling is to being linear, the more agile the IS would be in some contexts. Similar to ITTable 1. Attributes for selecting a response in an agile information system1. IS staff that lead tasks and projects with an accurate knowledge of controllable, partially controllable, and uncontrollable factors for the IS department/function.2. Estimation methods2.1. Scientific and formal estimation methods that can estimate the time, cost, robustness, and scope of a response.2.2. Experienced and knowledgeable IS staff for estimating the time, cost, robustness, and scope of a response.2.3. Access to knowledge-bases (e.g., sizing guidelines) of vendors of IT components to aid in estimation.3. Capability of IS to drive changes in the business processes to a limited extent.4. Capability of IS to drive changes in organizational rules and policies to a limited extent.。