Where does IT ambidexterity collide?

The capacity of an IT function to explore new information technologies while still exploiting the ones it already runs. Lee, Sambamurthy, Lim, and Wei set out this reading in their 2015 How does IT ambidexterity impact organizational agility?, building on March's 1991 split between exploration (search, variation, trying unfamiliar tools) and exploitation (refinement, reuse, running known systems). Here the thing that is ambidextrous is the firm's IT resource base, and the two poles are kinds of technology work. This is the narrowest of the meanings on this page: it is a property of the IT function itself, not of the whole firm, not a fit between IT and strategy, and not a way of splitting an IT unit into parts.[1][2]

Unit

An IT function's capacity to explore new IT and exploit existing IT at the same time

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Survey scales that rate a firm's IT exploration and IT exploitation separately, then combine or multiply them into an ambidexterity score

The balancing of two competing demands on IT strategy: aligning information technology tightly to the current business, and keeping it loose enough to change when the business does. Tallon and Pinsonneault framed this tension in their 2011 Competing perspectives on the link between strategic information technology alignment and organizational agility, where strong alignment can lock a firm into today's fit and reduce its room to adapt. Read as ambidexterity, the achievement is holding tight alignment and ready adaptability together. The two poles here are alignment and adaptability, not exploration and exploitation, so the tension being managed is a different one from the IT-capability meaning even though the same word is used.[3]

Unit

A firm's ability to keep IT aligned to strategy while staying able to adapt it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Survey measures of strategic IT alignment paired with measures of IT-enabled agility or flexibility, examined for how one trades against the other

The use of information technology to give the whole firm, not just its IT unit, the ability to both exploit current operations and explore new moves. Sambamurthy, Bharadwaj, and Grover's 2003 Shaping agility through digital options described how IT builds a stock of digital options, a reach and richness of process and knowledge capabilities, that a firm can draw on to act in either mode. In this reading IT is the enabler and the firm is what becomes ambidextrous, so the referent is the organization's overall explore-and-exploit capacity as supported by technology. That is a wider unit than the IT-capability meaning, where the IT function's own technology work is what is scored.[4]

Unit

A firm's IT-enabled capacity to exploit current business and explore new business

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Measures of IT-based digital options or IT infrastructure capability linked to indicators of the firm's exploratory and exploitative activity

Ambidexterity managed by how the IT organization is arranged: separating exploratory work from exploitative work and steering the paradoxes between them. Gregory, Keil, Muntermann, and Mähring studied this in their 2015 Paradoxes and the nature of ambidexterity in IT transformation programs, tracing how a large program held apart a stable, efficiency-minded mode and a change-minded, experimental mode and reconciled the tensions across them. The referent here is a structural and governance arrangement inside IT, close in spirit to bimodal or two-speed IT, rather than a survey score of one capability, a strategic fit, or a firm-wide enabler. It is ambidexterity as an organizing choice about IT, not a rating of it.[5]

Unit

An IT program or unit split into separate exploratory and exploitative parts under one roof

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Case and field study of how an IT program structures, staffs, and governs its exploratory versus exploitative activities and resolves conflicts between them