This book presents cutting-edge research and thinking on agile information systems. The concept of agile information systems has gained strength over the last 3 years, coming into the MIS world from manufacturing, where agile manufacturing systems has been an important concept for several years now. The idea of agility is powerful: with competition so fierce today and the speed of business so fast, a company’s ability to move with their customers and support constant changing business needs is more important than ever. Agile information systems:
• have the ability to add, remove, modify, or extend functionalities with minimal penalties in terms of time, cost, and effort
• have the ability to process information in a flexible manner
• have the ability to accommodate and adjust to the changing needs of the end-users.
This is the first book to bring together academic experts, researchers, and practitioners to discuss how companies can create and deploy agile information systems. Contributors are well-regarded academics known to be on the cutting-edge of their fields.
The Editor, Kevin Desouza, has organized the chapters under three categories:
• discussion of the concept of agile information systems (i.e. defining agile information management, its attributes, antecedents, consequences, etc.)
• discussion of information systems within the context of agility (i.e., descriptions of agile information systems and their attributes, how to build agile information systems, etc.)
• discussion of organizational management issues in the context of agile information systems (i.e., how to prepare the organization for agile information systems, management of agile information systems for improved organizational performance, etc.)
Acknowledgements
About the Editor
About the Contributors
1. Strategizing for agility: Confronting information systems inflexibility in dynamic environments, Robert D. Galliers
2. Agile information systems for agile decision making, William B. Rouse
3. The logic of knowledge: KM principles support agile systems, William E. Halal
4. Producing and consuming agility, Anders Mårtensson
5. Business agility: Need, readiness and alignment with IT-strategies, Marcel van Oosterhout, Eric Waarts, Eric van Heck, and Jos van Hillegersberg
6. Achieving economic returns from IS support for strategic flexibility: The roles of firm-specific, complementary organizational culture and structure, Michael J. Zhang
7. Balancing stability and flexibility: The case of the California Energy Commission, Miguel Gabriel Custodio, Alan Thorogood, and Philip Yetton
8. Enabling strategic agility through agile information systems: The roles of loose coupling and web services oriented architecture, John G Mooney and Dale Ganley
9. Agile information systems as a double dream, Silvia Gherardi and Andrea Silli
10. Degrees of agility: Implications for information systems design and firm strategy, Tsz-Wai Lui and Gabriele Piccoli
11. Integration management for heterogeneous Information Systems, Joachim Schelp and Robert Winter
12. Investigating the role of information systems in contributing to the agility of modern supply chains, Adrian E. Coronado M. and Andrew C. Lyons
13. Clumsy Information Systems: A critical review of Enterprise Systems, Sue Newell, Erica L Wagner, and Gary David
14. Enterprise information systems and the preservation of agility, Anthony Wensley and Eveline van Stijn
15. Interpretative flexibility and hosted ERP systems, Sarah Cadili and Edgar A. Whitley
16. Agile drivers, capabilities and value: An over-arching assessment framework for systems development, Kieran Conboy and Brian Fitzgerald
17. Vigilant information systems: The Western digital experience, Bob Houghton, Omar A. El Sawy, Paul Gray, Craig Donegan, and Ashish Joshi
18. Coors Brewing point of sale application suite: An agile development project, Jack Buffington and Donald J. McCubbrey
19. Organizational agility with mobile ICT? The case of London Black Cab Work, Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood and Carsten Sørensen
20. Co-evolution and Co-design of agile organizations and information systems through agent-based modeling, Mark E. Nissen and Yan Jin
Biography
C. Desouza Kevin
