Information Systems for Organizational Agility: Action Research on Resource Scheduling at the Universidad de Chile

Organizations need to exhibit characteristics of agility to stay ahead of their competitors and to survive in dynamic environments. One major concern for organizations is how to implement Information Systems (ISs) to enhance their agility. Organizations tend to spend too many resources to change their entire IS instead of only the components that cause problems without exactly knowing whether it enables or suppress organizational agility. To address these shortcomings and practical issues, we provide a framework to assess organizational agility and to diagnose a problem related to IS. By applying this prototype of the Agility Framework, we were able to diagnose a problem that the department of Management Control and Information Systems at the Universidad de Chile had and planned actions for them to improve its organizational agility with a course scheduling system, eClasSkeduler. This action research, which took more than 25-month for the first cycle, further develops the Agility Framework, which not only provides a way to link IS with organizational functions but also illustrates how to use it to diagnose a situation and plan actions for improving organizational agility through an information system.