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.

Much attention is currently being paid in both the academic and practitioner literatures to the value that organisations could create through the use of big data and business analytics (Gillon et a...

Sharma and Yetton, in 2003, hypothesized and found empirical support for the moderating effect of task interdependence on the relationship between management support and implementation success. In this issue of EJIS, Hwang and Schmidt critique Sharma and Yetton's meta-analysis protocol, arguing that a random-effects model should have been employed, rather than the fixed-effect model they used. Further, Hwang and Schmidt claim that the moderating effect hypothesized by Sharma and Yetton is not supported when a random-effects model is employed. We re-analyze Sharma and Yetton's data by employing a dedicated, commercially available package for conducting random-effects meta-analysis. Our analysis finds no support for Hwang and Schmidt's claim. The random-effects meta-analysis supports Sharma and Yetton's original findings: task interdependence moderates the effect of management support on implementation success.

Current computing systems do not support human work effectively. They restrict human–computer interaction to one mode at a time and are designed with an assumption that use will be by individuals (rather than groups), directing (rather than interacting with) the system. To support the ways in which humans work and interact, a new paradigm for computing is required that is multimodal, rather than unimodal, collaborative, rather than personal, and dialogue‐enabled, rather than unidirectional. To address this challenge, we have developed an approach for designing natural, multimodal, multiuser dialogue‐enabled interfaces to geographic information systems that make use of large‐screen displays and integrated speech–gesture interaction. After outlining our goals and providing a brief overview of relevant literature, we introduce the Dialogue‐Assisted Visual Environment for Geoinformation (DAVE_G). DAVE_G is being developed using a human‐centred systems approach that contextualizes development and assessment in the current practice of potential users. In keeping with this human‐centred approach, we outline a user task analysis and associated scenario development that implementation is designed to support (grounded in the context of emergency response), review our own precursors to the current prototype system and discuss how the current prototype extends upon past work, provide a detailed description of the architecture that underlies the current system, and introduce the approach implemented for enabling mixed‐initiative human–computer dialogue. We conclude with a discussion of goals for future research.