The Extent of IT-Enabled Organizational Flexibility: An Exploratory Study among Australian Organizations

The intensity of market competition, the ever increasing demand for shortening time to market and the pressure of first mover advantage are forcing businesses to develop non-imitable sources of value creation. Information technology (IT) plays a key role as a necessary, but not sufficient, source of value. For IT to generate business value, IT has to adapt itself to a firm’s continuously changing competitive environment. The strategic value of IT can be defined as an enabler of organizational flexibility. Hence, IT-enabled organizational flexibility is of strategic importance to organizations and has been found to affect competitive advantage. This study uses an enhanced concept of IT-enabled flexibility to investigate IT-enabled organizational flexibility among Australian organizations. The findings show that, even though Australian companies exhibit IT enabled organizational flexibility, company and IT department size are influencing the flexibility of IT. The paper provides an indication of the extent to which Australian organizations are poised to exploit the value generating potential of IT. Practitioners can use the result to benchmark where they stand in regards to the flexibility of their IT.