Exploring the Influence of Service-oriented Architectures on Organizational Agility - A Case Study

Companies increasingly face turbulent and dynamic environments characterized by mostly unforeseeable changes. A viable strategy to survive in such environments is to strengthen organizational agility, which denotes the ability to quickly cope with continuous unanticipated change and to take advantage of opportunities in the environment. Serviceoriented architecture (SOA) accompanied by related organizational mechanisms have been identified as promising means to shape organizational agility. However, research concerning SOA’s impact on organizational agility lacks an in-depth understanding on how agility is enabled. Applying case-based research, this research-in-progress investigates this relationship in an in-depth, intensive manner, thus providing the opportunity to refine the concept of organizational agility in terms of explaining how it can be achieved. We present and discuss preliminary findings on success stories positively relating SOA and organizational