MIS Research Center Seminar Series
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM
1st Floor Auditorium, Carlson School of Management

Executive Summary
Enterprise Agility and Information Technology Management
V. Sambamurthy ( Michigan State University )

As strategic and operating conditions become increasingly challenging due to hyper-competition, investment cycle compression, regulatory changes and technological advancements, the ability to sense relevant change and respond readily has become an important determinant of firm success. The term “agility” is commonly used to describe firms that thrive in rapidly changing environments. Agility is vital both to the innovation and competitive performance of firms in contemporary business environments. Agile firms continually sense opportunities for new competitive action in their product-market spaces and marshal the necessary knowledge and assets for seizing those opportunities.

Our research shows that enterprise agility can evolve in two forms: adaptive agility and entrepreneurial agility . Adaptive agility is the capacity for operational innovation, resilience, and flexibility. Entrepreneurial agility is the capacity to conduct strategic experiments with new technologies or business models and to take advantage of competitive opportunities by launching radical innovations.

We recommend that firms recognize agility and alignment as important capabilities in their strategy portfolio. Alignment facilitates world class execution and leverage of the current business models. On the other hand, adaptive agility facilitates operational innovation while entrepreneurial agility facilitates strategic experiments and the development of strategic options.

This briefing is intended to help managers make informed decisions through a better understanding of how agility is an element of a firm's strategic behaviors. Further, this research provides guidelines about how to position information technology management in support of a firm's portfolio of agility and alignment capabilities.

Biography

V. Sambamurthy (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1989) is the Eli Broad Professor of Information Technology at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University . He is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Leadership of the Digital Enterprise ( www.bus.msu.edu/clode ), a new research center at the Broad School that is dedicated to issues associated with the convergence between information technologies and business strategy, business processes, innovation, and governance. The center is funded through a five-year seed grant from Michigan State University and corporate board memberships. With a current annual budget of nearly $750,000, the goal of the center is to stimulate collaborative research on key aspects of the digital enterprise. He has previously taught at the business schools at The University of Maryland and The Florida State University. He has expertise in how firms successfully leverage information technologies in sustaining superior performance through their business strategies, products, services, and organizational processes. He has researched issues related to the impacts of CIO and top management team characteristics on firms' success with IT assimilation, the impacts of institutional forces on organizational IT assimilation, and the capabilities and factors associated with strategic leverage of IT. His current research includes the impacts of information technologies on strategic agility and the design of inter-organizational collaboration networks for product design and supply chain systems. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Information Systems Research , one of the top journals for research on information systems.

Most of his research has been conducted in Fortune 500 firms and has been funded by the Financial Executives Research Foundation, the Advanced Practices Council (APC), and the National Science Foundation. The Advanced Practices Council is a group of 25 CIOs of Fortune 500 firms who commission research on topics of relevance to their work. Sambamurthy has executed four different projects for this group on topics related to the emerging organizational models for the IT function, the design of collaboration relationships between business and IS executives and the management of IT-enabled strategic agility. In addition to numerous academic publications, he has written executive-oriented articles in the CIO, Optimize, and CIO Insight magazines. Recently, he co-authored a book on information technology management, title d, Winning the 3-Legged Race: When Business and Technology Run Together , Prentice Hall, 2006.

Sambamurthy teaches courses related to the integration of information technology and corporate strategy. He has been actively involved in executive education on current topics such as facilitating business innovation through information technologies (IT), making sense of the business value of IT, strategic management of IT, and the organizing and sourcing of IT activities, assets, and services in contemporary firms. He has worked as a researcher or consultant with several Fortune 500 firms including 3M, General Dynamics, Owens Corning, Intel, Bell Atlantic, AstraZeneca, Freddie Mac, and BellSouth.