Should organisations force business units to use shared IT resources, or should business units, notwithstanding the potential for duplication and higher costs, be allowed to select their own IT resources? If successful, efforts to expand IT resource relatedness will increase the sharing of IT resources across business units leading to higher business unit agility. Alternatively, forced IT resource sharing could remove IT optionality, thereby impeding business unit operations and agility. To investigate these opposing viewpoints, we consider how systems of complements involving three distinct IT resource classes (IT infrastructure, applications, and data) affect business unit agility. Which IT resources are shared matters as the complementarity effects from sharing various IT resources may be different from the marginal effects of sharing just one type of IT resource. We investigate these arguments using data from 120 organisations. Analysis shows that sharing applications and data enables business unit agility, while sharing IT infrastructure hurts business unit agility. Follow-up qualitative interviews with senior IT executives support and extend these findings. In combination, the results of our quantitative and qualitative studies enhance our understanding of how IT resource relatedness influences business unit agility, contingent on both the level and type of IT resource sharing.

Agility has long been recognised as a key determinant of organisational performance. The pursuit of agility within business units (BUs) is challenging as IT executives in multi-business organisations (MBOs) are tasked with balancing a need for organisation-wide IT synergies against a desire among BUs for local IT solutions that enable agility in their end markets. MBOs are increasingly turning to corporate IT platforms to respond to their BUs’ IT needs but doing so presents a challenge to BU IT autonomy and, in turn, to BU agility. In this paper, we posit that BU agility is determined by resource synergies based on the interplay between corporate IT platforms and local, BU-controlled, IT applications. These applications lead to greater BU process digitisation and, in turn, to expanded BU agility. We evaluate our model using data from an international survey of IT executives in MBOs. Our findings provide support for our model and, in so doing, identify different paths that MBOs can take to enhance BU agility. Our contribution affirms the value of corporate IT platforms for BU agility but suggests that MBOs should tread carefully when developing corporate IT platforms that coincide with mandatory use of shared IT applications.

As we approach the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the now-classic paper on strategic agility by Sambamurthy et al. (2003), we are reminded that information technology (IT) executives c...

The alignment of business strategy and IT has been a top managerial concern for decades. Yet despite much investigation, the effect of strategic IT alignment on organizational performance remains unclear, with mixed results reported in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of mixed findings in IT alignment research. We first examine inconsistent findings reported in two streams of alignment research: the traditional firm-level IT alignment literature and the emerging literature into process-level IT alignment. We then empirically investigate whether firm- and process-level conceptualizations of IT alignment lead to different conclusions about the effect of alignment on performance. Using data from a survey of 120 firms, we show that firm-level IT alignment and process-level IT alignment yield different conclusions when testing the same theory under the same conditions. We also show that differences in firms’ strategic orientations can help explain these results. This research provides evidence that firm- and process-level conceptualizations of IT alignment are not interchangeable and that the choice of conceptualization can mean the difference between accepting and rejecting a theory.