IT Competence. Prior research on alignment and enterprise agility has identified complementary organizational capabilities and resources that influence the information systems architecture alignment with business structure, business strategy and external market environment. Among the organizational context variables investigated were firm size, organizational structure, (Xxxxx et al. 1994), organizational context (Chan 2002), and individual and other organizational characteristics (Xxxxxxx 1999). The resource based view sums up those idiosyncratic and inimitable resources and capacities as dynamic capabilities. In the context of information systems, IT competence is the core capability of a firm that enables use and manipulation of information systems. IT competence includes all the information systems related capabilities of an organization or enterprise. Hence, a high degree of IT competence should lead to better management, manipulation and use of internal information systems, which result in a more effective creation of digital options. As such, IT competence will also lead to better alignment between IT architecture and external environment. Proposition 4: IT competence positively influences the alignment of IT architecture and environment. Turbulence The prior hypotheses have taken the turbulence of the environment into account. The review of alignment claims that the process of alignment is subject to the influence turbulence (Xxxxxxxxx and Chan 2001). Xxxxxxxxx et al. (2001) identified that that the degree of turbulence, characterized as evolutionary and revolutionary periods, mediates the structural alignment. Moreover, one of the main propositions of the enterprise agility literature is that as environments become increasingly turbulent and they can only be matched by a solution space that is created by digital options. While there is no standard definition of what differentiates a turbulent from a non-turbulent environment, the degree of turbulence impacts how quickly and how well ISA architectures are aligned with the external reality. In more turbulence, organizations need to generate more digital options to match the demands of and align to the changing environment. Assuming that organizations are limited in the digital options they can create, a high degree of turbulence should have a negative impact. Since turbulence is an exogenous variable, it will be used as a control characteristic in the theoretical model. The research model and the research context ...
IT Competence. Alignment Optimal Configurations The set of experiments in investigated the effects of the idiosyncratic characteristics on the alignment of ISA in different external environments. The investigation provides insights in the optimal configurations of characteristics in different degrees of turbulence. The optimal configurations are depicted in Table 3. A review of the optimal configurations shows that there most system characteristics have an optimal degree, regardless of the environmental turbulence. Low Coupling and high IT Competence always warrant better alignment. The impacts of Modularity and System Substitution, on the other hand, are not consistent. The ability to exchange individual dimensions or subsystems varied with the degree of environmental turbulence. System Interoperability acts as a key driver of alignment. In an environment that is static, systems can be tweaked to efficiently align with the external conditions. However, as turbulence increases, there is a need to exchange components to efficiently adjust to the environment. In order for systems to be responsive, they cannot be tweaked by internally changing subsystems. External solutions need to be incorporated that better reflect the needs to the external environment. The interoperability of the interfaces is only a necessary condition for this effect to take place. As discussed earlier, there needs to be a market for externally components that is readily available for “on the fly integration”. Recommendations of how such a market can be encouraged will be further investigated in the examination of the on demand systems in practice. Table 3: Optimal ISA Configuration for Different Degrees of Environmental Turbulence Parameter Low Turbulence Medium Turbulence High Turbulence Modularity Medium/High Low/Medium/High Medium Coupling Low Low Low System Interoperability Low Medium High System Substitution Medium High Medium/High IT Competence High High High To be certain that the separate effect hold in a setting where all characteristics are varied, a second experiment is carried out that examines the simultaneous effects of the system characteristics on the alignment with turbulent environments.
