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...

Since firms rarely collect data on the precise economic or financial impacts of information technology (IT), perceptions play a key role in assessing IT impacts. To the extent that executives in the same firm evaluate IT impacts similarly, it can be easier to approve future IT investments or to initiate corrective action for failing IT investments. In this study, we use distributed sensemaking theory to investigate the conditions under which executives will reach a consensus as to the extent and locus of firm and process-level IT impacts in their firm. Using data from surveys of 133 top-level business executives in 13 firms, we show that consensus is a function of CIO-led sensegiving in the form of IT promotion, CIO leadership, information systems (IS) engagement with end users, and IS-business communications. The absence of consensus – discord – suggests IS disengagement, a lack of effective CIO leadership, weak IT-business communications, and ineffective promotion of the role of IT. Sensegiving does not mean telling executives what to think about IT but rather how to think about IT and its impacts at various points within the firm. Whether IT impacts are rated high or low, efforts to create increased consensus among executives can greatly enhance value from IT.