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Top1. Introduction
The concept of agility has been looked at extensively in IS research over the duration of the field’s existence (e.g., Sambamurthy et al., 2003; Chan et al., 2019; Baham et al., 2017; Lee & Xia, 2010; Venkatesh et al., 2020). Over time, various facets of agility have been studied in the context of IS-agility in systems development (Lyytinen & Rose 2006; McAvoy et al., 2013), the agility of systems themselves (Hobbs & Scheepers, 2010), and organizational agility enabled by information systems (Huang et al., 2014; Mao & Quan, 2015; Tallon et al., 2019). A more recent concept is that of resilience. Although resilience has been studied in multiple other fields, such as individual resilience (sometimes referred to as grit) (Crawford-Garrett, 2018; Gligor et al., 2019 citing McCubbin et al., 1998; Ledford et al., 2021, Miller-Graff, 2020), organizational resilience (Fiksel, 2006; Hamel & Valikangas 2003; Ortiz-de-Mandojana & Bansal 2016), and supply chain resilience (Jüttner & Maklan 2011; Ponomarov & Holcomb 2009; Scholten & Schilder, 2015), its application in information systems is relatively nascent. Both agility and resilience continue to receive attention in information systems literature, especially in light of recent exigencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic (c.f. Batra, 2020).
At the surface, there seems to be some overlap between the notions of agility and resilience, especially when it comes to an information system being the object of analysis. Agility and resilience are often discussed together in the context of an organization’s adaptive capability (McCann, Selsky, & Lee, 2009). However, in looking at specific facets of each concept, some aspects seem unique to each. For these concepts to mature in keeping with the development of systems and their use in organizations, it is important to better understand how each can be defined and applied in IS research.
To our knowledge, there is a gap in the literature that has studied the nature of the relationship between agility and resilience in IS literature. Doing so will inform research on the agility and resilience of information systems and help in the development of tools that can be used to study, measure, and develop them. It will also help companies evaluate their agile and resilient capabilities. Besides establishing face validity to these concepts as distinct theoretical notions, such research can be used as a starting point to identify unique processes and capabilities that companies can focus on to be agile and/or resilient. To address this gap, we embark on a literature review of the two concepts. Our sample comprises papers published in the basket of 8 IS journals that address agility and resilience. We use thematic analysis to help identify and code aspects within each concept.
Our contribution to IS literature is the mapping of the relationship between how agility and resilience have been studied in the field. We identify specific facets that are in common between the two and others that are unique to each concept.
The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The next section describes the data collection process for our structured literature review. Section 3 outlines our research methodology. Section 4 summarizes the findings and Section 5 presents their implications. The last section concludes the paper with contributions, limitations, and future research directions.