Creating Flexibility in Organizations
Organizational flexibility has long been considered, in the literature, as a precondition to enhanced productivity and profitability of ICT (Soh et al, 1997). For example, one of the reasons for the success of First Direct, the fully online British bank, is based on its flexible organization (Zollinger, 1999). Flexibility in this context may be defined as an organization’s ability to rapidly re-organise itself when needed. Flexibility in an organization can be created by using a number of the change management tactics discussed above. In general, organizations with flatter structures show more flexibility than those with a large number of hierarchies. Similarly organizations with modern computer systems can respond to change faster than those organizations still using legacy systems.