It Ambidexterity - Conceptualization at the Business Process Level

In todays digitized and globalized economy, companies face increasing competitive pressures and unprecedented speed of change in business conditions. Considering limited IT budgets, process owners and IT departments need to decide how to divide their spending on efficiency-enhancing and flexibility-enhancing IT capabilities to optimally support their business processes. Turning from thinking of efficiency and flexibility as trade-off towards ambidexterity puts focus on simultaneously pursuing efficiency through exploitative and flexibility through explorative business process IT (BPIT) capabilities. While these capabilities have been analysed in combination at the organizational level and independently at the business process-level, there is scarce research on the combined effects of those activities for a particular business process. This research paper presents conceptualization and operationalization of ambidextrous IT capabilities at the business process level. In addition, further concepts that are relevant for analysis of BPIT ambidexterity, such as business process performance, operational ambidexterity and business process uncertainty are adapted to the process level. Thus, we intend to contribute to the area of business process management (BPM) and research on ambidexterity in IS through the expansion of existing work by providing constructs and scales for further research on these phenomena at the business process level.