Agility Within Higher Education It Organizations: a Loosely Coupled Systems Perspective

Abstract

This dissertation examines how leadership focus on innovation and organizational centralization relate with organizational agility, speed of technology adoption, and defined governance processes and technology standards. The study used data from the 2015 Educause survey of higher education IT organizations (N = 822). A five-component framework of organizational agility was identified via factor analysis and subsequently used to evaluate relationships between study variables. Findings reveal that leadership focus on innovation was statistically significant in predicting all five identified components of organizational agility, the speed of technology adoption, and the adoption of defined governance standards, reinforcing the perspective that communication is critically important in supporting the organizational agility concepts of sensing and responding. Additionally, despite existing theoretical perspectives, the study provided no supporting evidence that organizational centralization was related to organizational agility, the speed of technology adoption, nor the adoption of defined governance processes and technology standards. Lastly, the findings reveal that leadership focus on innovation is not negatively related to organizational centralization as initially theorized, but the relationship is actually positive. This positive finding between leadership focus on innovation and organizational centralization provides partial support for the perceived IT paradox.