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...

Information technology-based innovation involves considerable risk requiring foresight; yet our understanding of the way in which managers develop the insight to support new breakthrough applications is limited and remains obscured by high levels of technical and market uncertainty. This paper applies discrete choice analysis to support improved empirical explanation of how and why decisions are made in information systems (IS). A new experimental method based on information acceleration (IA) is also applied to improve prediction of future IS service strategies. Both explanation and prediction are important to IS research and these two behaviourally sound methods complement each other. Specifically, the combination of IA and discrete choice analysis removes misspecification artefacts from response variability and generates more accurate parameter estimates that better explain IS decision making.