AGILITY IN ORGANIZATION

This section is about how organizations in the 21st century should be designed to be successful and sustainable. It is based on the assumption that a current organizational design must be fundamentally different. This changing paradigm makes fundamentally new demands on corporate management in the 21st century. The authors Olbert & Prodoehl (2019) describe the current paradigm as the paradigm of the agile company.

In this context, the agilization of a company is seen as a holistic concept, according to which agile organizations are more than just the use of agile methods. It can be stated that the agility means more than just the use of agile techniques and practices that have been known and applied in software development for years.

Since both the terminology and the concept of organizational agility differ considerably from a scientific point of view, a literature analysis was conducted to derive a concept for operationalization. Similar to the previous literature reviews, a content analysis was conducted using important multi-databases such as EBSCO and Beluga. The search terms for finding articles related to the research work are: "Organizational Agility", "Enterprise Agility", "Agile Organization" and "Agility". An additional search for articles was conducted with Google Scholar to increase the reach of the search. To create the list, the authors, the methodology used and the concept of organizational agility were prepared. The results of the analysis are presented in table 5.

Table 5 Different Concepts of Agility in Organizations

Authors (publication) Methodology Conception of Organizational Agility

Goldman, S. L., Nagel, R. N., &

Preiss, K. (1995)

Conceptional work Market Capitalization &

Internal Adjustments Sambamurthy, V., Bharadwaj, A., &

Grover, V. (2003)

Review of Literature Digital Competence &

Internal Processes Overby, E., Bharadwaj, A., &

Sambamurthy, V. (2006)

Conceptional work Firm Knowledge &

Internal Processes Yang, C., &

Liu, H. M. (2012)

Empirical Study Customers Service &

Cooperation resources

Case Study Human Resources &

IT-Systems Ganguly, A., Nilchiani, R. & Farr, J.V.

(2009)

Empirical Study IT-Practices &

Supply Chain Agility Lu, Y., &

Ramamurthy, K. (2011)

Empirical Study Market Capitalization &

Operational Adjustments Denning, S.

(2015)

Review of Literature Mindset &

Organizational culture Teece, D., Peteraf, M., &

Leih, S. (2016).

Conceptional work Dynamic internal Capabilities &

Financial Resources Ravichandran, T.

(2018).

Empirical Study IT Competence &

Innovation Capacity

Given these findings, the majority of scientific work understands organizational agility as an internal ability to deal with unexpected changes that occur frequently in the business world by reacting quickly and creatively. This interpretation is based on the work of Goldman et al (1995). According to Zhang & Sharifi (2000), this is also the most commonly used understanding of agility in science. In summary, all work focuses on internal capabilities and postulates that these need to be promoted within the organization. Agility extends the concept of flexibility, which can normally be integrated into a business process. In this respect, agility extends the concept of strategic issues, which deals with unstructured change (Overby et al., 2006). The agility of a company is determined by five essential dimensions. These dimensions describe the basic directions that play a role in achieving organizational agility.

(1) Enrichment of the customer, (2) Cooperation to improve competitiveness, (3) Alignment to manage change and uncertainty, (4) Achievement of a fast reaction time of the employees, and (5) Thinking in solutions. According to Lu & Ramamurthy (2011), these five dimensions can essentially be divided into two types of organizational agility: Agility of market capitalization and agility of operational alignment. Market capitalizing agility refers to all the dimensions that are concerned with the ability of a company to remain competitive.

In this context, it is made clear that the first three dimensions - customer, market and cooperation - are the focus of this agility analysis. Given this, organizations should benefit from change by continuously monitoring products/services and meeting customer needs. This agility emphasizes a dynamic, aggressively change- and growth-oriented entrepreneurial mindset that focuses on strategic direction, decision-making and evaluation under uncertain conditions (Sambamurthy et al. 2003). For this it is postulated, that an agile company significantly generates customer value by providing products that are perceived by customers as individual problem solutions. In particular, products that are perceived by customers as individual problem solutions have a high profit potential. In contrast to the classic transaction business, where a customer buys a product, problem solutions are multidimensional. If products are perceived as multidimensional services, customers tend to show a comparatively high willingness to pay and are significantly more loyal to the company. Precisely this explanatory model shows to what extent agility can contribute indirectly to profit.

In addition, the work of Goodhue et al. (2007) showed that cooperation or strategic alliances can be interpreted as a response to increasing market dynamics. It can be stated that organizations can flexibly cooperate with other companies in order to find solutions and to exploit synergies. The third dimension of a company's alignment to cope with uncertainty and change reflects an overarching organizational perspective, as it addresses how a company should be aligned to deal with change and uncertainty in the interest of the company. This dimension is intended to ensure that an organization can also adapt to changes in the market.

In addition to agility from a market perspective, operational adjustments refer to a company's ability to embed and integrate market changes with internal business processes.

(Dove 2001; Sambamurthy et al. 2003). This type of agility thus emphasizes the flexibility of internal processes, which, as an important basis for fast and fluent implementation, enables adaptation. At the same time, this type of agility requires a constant willingness to change, whereby agility in particular must be anchored in the mindset and culture of the employees.

In addition to the operational embedding of agility mechanisms, there is also a need for change in order to develop an agility mentality and maintain it at an organizational level. Figure 7 shows the dimensions with regard to the two agility types. In this respect, the organizational perspective is linked to agility.

In order to achieve both types of agility, from an internal point of view, a timely processing of large amounts of information must be distributed and analyzed. In this context, Sambamurthy et al. (2003) describe that IT-enabled learning systems can help in this respect.

However, it must be assumed here that all IT capacities could exhaust financial resources and in turn place high demands on employees and managers. Furthermore, it can be seen that disruptive changes in the market environment make differentiation increasingly difficult and many companies may therefore be forced to continuously analyze their macro environment in order to build agility at the organizational level.

Finally, organizational agility creates the framework within which can develop their effectiveness. This is about creating understanding and structures, an attitude that is deeply rooted in the roots and foundation of the organization. Only this deep rootedness makes it possible to master the challenges and conflicts that arise when agile, lively, situation-driven action meets old, structured, optimized frameworks.

Figure 7 Types of Organizational Agility (adapted from: Sambamurthy et al., 2003).

Achievement of a fast