Balancing stability and flexibility: The case of the California energy commission

Organizations invest in Information Technology (IT) to drive current business performance, enable future business initiatives, and create business flexibility and agility (Weill and Broadbent, 1997; Weill, Subramani, and Broadbent, 2002; Ross, 2003). These benefits are well explored by both academics and practitioners (Brynjolfson and Hitt, 2000; Ross and Beath, 2002). They present two distinct and opposing views in relation to the impact of IT investment on organizational agility. One view is that IT can stabilize and facilitate business processes but can also obstruct the functional flexibility of organizations, making them slow and cumbersome in the face of emerging threats and opportunities. Such IT systems execute business policies and decisions that are hardwired by rigid, predefined process flows (Zoufaly, 2002). The development methods establish a legacy that dictates attitudes, behaviors, and understanding that are relevant to the past, with the organization becoming a “slave to the system” (Ward and Peppard, 2002).