INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE AND ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY: APPLICATION IN INDIAN FIRMS

Abstract

With markets becoming global and volatile, for contemporary businesses to survive, avoiding change and continuing with the traditional practices is like anathema. Organizational agility is replete with principles of customer focus that include customer enrichment, mastering change, leveraging resource and cooperating to compete. Practices such as linkages in workforce, virtual enterprise, customized manufacturing and concurrent engineering are agile attempts that can be catalyzed if integrated with information technology and lead to achieving agility. Governed by an organization wide IS strategy for the management of information systems it needs the commitment of top-management and positive attitudes from the workforce. IT enablement of business processes leads to dynamic capabilities that provide an advantage over the competitors. Success of IT based agile attempts might lead to organizational goals and realization of financial benefits but the Indian industry is in the process of resolving issues of socio-technical nature in technology acceptance for agility. In this research an attempt has been made to analyze the trends in the market and evaluate the potentials for agility. Survey of literature on agility and technology acceptance suggested the need of this topic to be investigated in Indian private sector. Literature was surveyed for current issues in agility and information technology acceptance. Gaps were identified from empirical studies and enlisted for being addressed in the review. A survey was designed to assess the current trends in the industry. Aquestionnaire was formulated to take opinions from managers and executives of companies in the Indian private sector. Mail survey was conducted in a specified period oftime. The questionnaire was designed to enquire about the agile level of companies, their integration with information technology and the potential practices to achieve agility. Demographic details were also taken. Analyses of the responses provided the demographic statistics on the basis of which inferences were drawn about how managers feel about accepting technology and adapting principles of agility. Certain hypotheses were set about the sectors of the industry and IT enablement of business processes. These were tested using multivariate analyses and discussed in the light of the findings. Finally an ANP based model has been tested and developed for agile drivers to help outrank an agile organization on the basis of the over all weightage assigned to the determinants of agility. The conclusions have been discussed with their implications for managers and academicians. Future research directions have been suggested. The research makes the following significant contribution: • The concept of agility has been envisioned for the Indian industry • An extensive review of literature has been conducted to identify the issues in agility and technology acceptance. • A questionnaire has been designed to address the issues of agilityand IT/IS • Survey of industry has been done and descriptive statistics have been given • Certain hypotheses have been set and tested • An ANP based model for outranking agile organizations has been presented The present research gives practical insights for managers and practitioners to implement agility with the help of information technology. Analyses of agile enablers and determinants would be useful for further research.