An Information Technology And Knowledge Management Capability Enabled Organizational Agility Framework

The importance of agility is widely accepted as agile organizations are more successful in the changing and competitive environment. Agile organizations can respond to market changes and customer needs quickly than competitors, leading to better performance. Currently, the organization tries to develop agility in a variety of ways to explore the market, meet customer needs and seize business opportunities. However, how the organization uses existing resources and capabilities, particularly in IT and knowledge management capabilities to build organizational agility is still a key issue in the current domestic and international research as well as in the managerial practice.While the relationship between information technology (IT)/knowledge management capabilities and organizational agility has been documented elsewhere, little is known about the extent to which these two capabilities affect organizational agility as well as their relative effectiveness. While the influence of internal and external contextual factors are often overlooked in previous research on agility. Therefore, this paper focused on organizational agility and constructed IT and knowledge management capability enabled framework as well as four sub-models, whose effectiveness are tested by the method of empirical research.First, this paper conceptualized organizational agility into market capitalizing agility and operational adjustment agility. By analyzing connotation of both types of agility, this paper matched the appropriate IT capabilities with agility and studied the internal mechanisms. For market capitalizing agility, with the introduction of absorption capacity theory, IT infrastructure and IT operation functions in different ways. IT infrastructure has a significant and positive relationship on absorptive capacity other than market capitalizing agility, while IT operation has both direct and indirect influences on market capitalizing agility. For operational adjustment agility, by introducing Van Mieghem operations strategy framework, this paper analyzed the power of IT capabilities in both resource and process aspects. In terms of resource aspect, IT infrastructure and IT reconfiguration are complimentary. In terms of process aspect, IT coordination and IT integration are substitutes.Second, this paper explored the relationship between IT resources and knowledge management capability. IT infrastructure resources, IT human resources and IT relationship resources have a positive impact on the knowledge management capability which affects the competitive advantage of the organization. The study also found that the impacts of three types of IT resources are positively moderated by organizational resource commitment to IT. The higher the resource commitment is, the greater effects of IT resources have been found on knowledge management capability.Finally, on the basis of chapters above, this paper integrated the resource-based view, knowledge-based view and contingency theory and discussed the IT and knowledge management capability enabled organizational agility model under the contingency environment. The paper also compared the relative impact of IT and knowledge management capabilities on organizational agility. The results indicate that both IT capability and knowledge management capability have a positive and significant impact on organizational agility, while the impact of knowledge management capability is stronger. In consideration of contextual factors, environmental uncertainty positively moderates the impact of IT and knowledge management capabilities on organizational agility, while information intensity has been found as a positive moderator in the relationship between knowledge management capability and agility.