ICT Enabling Customer Agility: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective

Achieving customer agility is key to organizational performance and market satisfaction. It is an emerging research area where only few studies have been conducted so far. This research-in-progress aims to go beyond the dominating conceptual view on customer agility to provide in-depth understanding on how IT contributes to achieving customer agility in practice. Customer agility is about sensing and responding to customers’ changing demands, patterns and opportunities and the alignment between sensing and responding. The literature review suggests a relationship between customer agility and organizational dynamic capability. The dynamic capability model of Pavlou and El Sawy (2011) is adopted as an initial sensitizing device to aid data collection and analysis. A longitudinal case study has been conducted in a large European bank (EuroBank). In this paper, we present an initial theoretical framework to examine how ICT could be leveraged in achieving customer agility and aligning customer sensing and responding capabilities.