Organisational ambidexterity in IT organisations: A study of Barriers and Strategies

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore what barriers exists in an IT organisation, to reach the state of organisational ambidexterity and what strategies can be used to overcome these barriers. Viewpoints covered in this research is focusing on how exploitation and exploration is perceived in an IT organisation and what impediments there are, mainly for exploration, as the outcome of the research showed that IT organisations are more exploitation oriented. Aspects as agility and alignment are also discussed, as these subjects were found to be interesting and the lack of them hindered exploration. The research was inspired by my own professional experience that IT organisations are being very exploitation oriented and by the question: why IT, most often, is not seen as an innovation partner by the business organisation. The research was conducted as a qualitative case study, where the data was collected through seven interviews with six different interviewees. The findings lead to the formulation of three statements around the barriers for exploitation. Incentives focus around reducing costs, the lack of knowledge of each other’s organisations and the way the IT organisation is perceived, were identified as barriers for exploration. The findings also culminated into three statements around strategies or solutions for how to reach organisational ambidexterity. The strategy that was used, could be identified as structural ambidexterity and was chosen because of the possibility to have new solutions in form of an agile work approach, new KPI’s and a separate budget. The structural ambidexterity strategy was found to have some flaws in form of becoming too detached from the traditional IT operations. Based on the findings it is concluded that the structural ambidexterity approach can work successfully for an IT organisation, but that it comes with its own problems and that the exploration efforts are still minimal, because of the traditional IT operations tasks will always play a big part of the IT organisations activities, which will be exploitation oriented.