Enterprise Systems and Organisational Agility: Conceptualizing the Link

The impact of enterprise systems (ES) on organisational agility (OA) is an under-researched area. Given the trends that most large organisations are moving towards ES and investing heavily on ES infrastructure and the increasing demand for agility, lack of research on ES and OA is a critical oversight. Using insights from the resource based view and dynamic capability theories; this paper argues that organisations can exploit the power of ES to improve their agility in three significant ways – by creating an ES enabled sensing capability and by constantly building ES enabled responding capability. We also argue that the quality of the ES infrastructure which we refer to as ES competence provides the necessary technical and business platform for deploying ES in building and rebuilding sensing and responding capabilities. Our theorising makes an original contribution to IS research by extending current ES research which thus far has focused on ES implementation issues.