Digital-Enabled Strategic Agility: The Next Frontier

Abstract

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 continue to view strategic agility as one of their most enduring challenges (Kappelman et al., 2021). Defined as the extent to which organisations can respond to sudden, disruptive, and unanticipated market events with ease, speed, and dexterity (Sambamurthy et al., 2003; Tallon et al., 2019), strategic agility has come of age in an era where organisations face a host of threats and opportunities from forces both seen and unseen. If done correctly, digital-enabled strategic agility can enable rapid, scalable, and cost effective changes in products, services, and processes but, if done poorly, the price of rigidity and delays can be inordinately high as oncelauded industry giants such as Sears, General Electric, Xerox, and Kodak have discovered (Collins, 2009). Our motivation for pursuing this special issue was prompted, in part, by a dearth of research on the topic of strategic agility in the literature. When writing a review paper on the subject in 2018 (Tallon et al., 2019), we uncovered 83 papers published across a variety of premier information systems (IS) journals and conferences between 2000 and 2018; three-fourths of this number appeared after 2009. Even then, less than five papers have been published annually on a topic that is garnering increased attention from IT executives for its ability to deliver greater customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and operational effectiveness (Kappelman et al., 2021). Our focus on strategic agility assumed a new air of importance in spring 2020 for no sooner had we sent out our Call for Papers than the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Organisations’ subdued response to the pandemic brought into sharp relief the need for fresh thinking on what it means to be “agile”. Organisations who were slow to pivot were mercilessly punished; retailers who relied heavily on foot traffic such as Brooks Brothers, Neiman Marcus, and JC Penney were especially vulnerable. Others such as Zoom, Uber Eats, Home Depot, Netflix, and Disney were able to scale and innovate around their existing processes and business models in order to remain relevant. Perhaps this time is different for the pandemic exposed the limits of what organisations could really do. For those who say that organisations could never have foreseen this calamitous event and so could never have planned an effective response, perhaps we should reconsider that logic so that we are better prepared next time. So what could we have done differently? We might also ask whether efforts to boost strategic agility are seen as just another IT problem for the IS function to resolve or whether strategic agility is an opportunity that warrants serious attention from all organisational leaders.