Transforming Organizational Capabilities into Agile IT Adoption: A Case Study of Beijing International Airport

In this increasingly hypercompetitive environment, agile IT adoption practices constitute the foundation that drives the speed and extent of the adoption of appropriate IT systems especially in times of urgency. These practices are a priori conditions that enable enterprise agility that is becoming an imperative competitive requirement for firm’s survival. The main contribution of this study is it provides an explanation of how agile IT adoption practices can be developed within an organization. It also highlights the various types of agile IT adoption practices that can be developed within an organization. It achieves this by using a single embedded case study design that investigates into four large IT system implementations during the construction of Beijing’s International Terminal 3 Airport for the 2008 Olympics Games. Looking through the theoretical lens of the coevolutionary of organizational control and trust upon the collected data, several inductively derived models which detail the development of the four agile IT adoption practices consisting of 2 sensing practices: preemptive-based and precision-based; and 2 responding practices: adeptness-based and improvement-based, are presented. This paper concludes with a discussion of the implications and potential theoretical and practical contributions of these models.