بهبود انعطاف پذیری استراتژیک با فناوری اطلاعات: بینش برای عملکرد شرکت در یک اقتصاد نوظهور Improving strategic flexibility with information technologies: insights for firm performance in an emerging economy

Introduction With increasingly uncertain and volatile business environments, strategic flexibility, which refers to firms’ ability to reallocate and reconfigure their organizational resources, processes, and strategies to deal with environmental changes (Zhou and Wu, 2010), is a key business imperative (Sambamurthy et al., 2003; Chen et al., 2014). Firms’ chances of survival in volatile marketplaces, global competition, shortened product life cycles, and customer pressures for tailored offerings depend largely on their ability to adapt rapidly to environmental changes (Nadkarni and Herrmann, 2010; Zhou and Wu, 2010). Faced with these challenging external demands, firms’ adaptability seems to hinge on their strategic flexibility (Drnevich and Croson, 2013). Information technology (IT) is a key enabler of strategic flexibility, and firms reply on it for automation, cost reduction, and improvement of operational efficiency (Duncan, 1995; Bhatt and Grover, 2005). Beyond supporting tactical and operational impacts, IT is instrumental in helping firms support or transform strategies, business models, and relationships between companies and their partners and customers (Bharadwaj et al., 2013). IT provides companies with advanced computing capacity, information processing and analytic abilities, and stronger empowering capabilities, helping them enter new markets and launch new ways to conduct business. For example, the Chinese mobile-device maker Xiaomi has built a community of fans to collect feedback and recommendations for product designs (McKinsey, 2015). Chemical manufacturers use big data to help farmers monitor crop conditions in real time and customize their offerings to increase farm yields (McKinsey, 2015). IT is needed to support firms’ rapid product development, and collection and dissemination of market, product and process information to respond effectively to unanticipated changes in the business environment. Recent studies posit that IT capabilities (e.g., IT management and IT competencies) help firms to exploit opportunities and reconfigure IT resources to avoid disadvantageous outcomes, demonstrating IT’s key role in attaining and deploying strategic flexibility.1 Extant conceptual frameworks propose several relationships involving IT capabilities, flexibility and firm performance, and recent papers have examined the proposed relationships empirically. For example, Lu and Ramamurthy (2011) provide evidence of the links between IT capabilities and operational and marketing flexibility. Tallon and Pinsonneault (2011) consider the relations between the combination of customer, partnering and operational flexibility, and organizational performance as moderated by environmental volatility. Chen et al. (2014) show that IT capability can improve firm performance by means of process flexibility.