A conceptual framework for agility in sociotechnical contexts

Abstract

Organisational agility is crucial for organisations to thrive in dynamic business environments. While the Information Systems (IS) discipline recognises the need for IS to support organisational agility, current IS research has not sufficiently explained how organisations achieve agility given their sociotechnical contexts. Some scholars and practitioners propose scaling agility-building approaches from small software development teams to the enterprise level, and others argue that agility is not a predetermined outcome of linear processes, but instead emerges from intricate organisational contexts. Previous research proposed a conceptual model that identified the structural components of agility in IS. However, this structural perspective does not address the dynamic aspects of agility. To address this gap, two systematic literature reviews (SLR) were conducted to develop a conceptual framework for agility in sociotechnical contexts, which is the contribution this research makes to the IS field. The first SLR investigated frameworks that enable organisational agility. Consequently, the Cynefin framework was adopted to explain the dynamics of contextualised decision-making and agility. The second SLR identified the influence of heuristics on decision-making and dynamic capabilities. The resulting framework integrates the structural and dynamic aspects of agility in IS and explains how heuristics could potentially be managed to improve sociotechnical agility.

Keywords

• agility
• sociotechnical
• complex adaptive systems
• dynamic capabilities
• cynefin
• critical systems heuristics