Flexibility – Description

IT infrastructure flexibility is viewed as a core competency of an organization (Davenport and Linder 1994) and must be able to handle increased customer demands without increased costs (Weill 1993).  According to Venkatraman (1994), flexibility should be the main focus of IT infrastructure and is one of the most important factors in selecting and IT application or system (Allen and Boynton 1991).  Based partly on the notion of organizational design by Huber and McDaniel (1986), Nelson and Ghods (1998) defined and validated two dimensions of technology flexibility, namely structural and process flexibility.  Structural flexibility is the “capability of the design and organization of a technology to be successfully adapted to business process changes”, while process flexibility is the “ability of people to make changes to the technology using management processes that support business process changes” (Nelson and Ghods 1998, p. 233).  Further, Nelson and Cooprider (2002) propose that software system flexibility should be defined as a two-dimensional construct composed of structural and process flexibility based on measures of flexibility in the behavioral psychology and software engineering literature.  Structural flexibility is the capability of the design and organization of a software application to be successfully adapted to business changes, while process flexibility is the ability of people to make changes to the technology using management processes that support business changes.