Understanding how digital architectures enable organizational agility remains a central challenge in information systems research. This study examines how service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables organizational agility in dynamic environments. While SOA is often promoted as a key enabler of agility, prior research has offered limited insight into the organizational processes through which architectural design principles translate into agility. Drawing on a dynamic capability perspective, we aim to deepen understanding of SOA’s organizational impact by explaining how its architectural design principles enable sensing, decision-making and responding activities through recurring organizational processes.
We conducted an in-depth qualitative single case study of an international telecommunications provider. Adopting a dynamic capability perspective, we analyzed how SOA’s design principles shape the organizational processes underlying agility. Data were collected through interviews, document analysis and observations, enabling a rich understanding of how architectural design principles influence sensing, decision-making and responding activities in practice.
Our analysis reveals that SOA design principles enable organizational agility through three recurring organizational processes: (1) directed perception, (2) architectural coordination and (3) mixing and matching. These processes underpin sensing, decision-making and responding activities, with particularly strong effects on decision-making and responding. The findings provide a conceptual model explaining how architectural design principles shape the microfoundations of organizational agility.
This research is based on a single case study, which limits generalizability but allows for deep contextual insights. The findings suggest that examining the microfoundations of agility provides a promising avenue for understanding how digital infrastructures translate into higher-order organizational capabilities. In addition, the study highlights decision-making agility as an important but still underexplored manifestation of agility, pointing to opportunities for future research.
Because different SOA design principles support different agility components, managers can target architectural investments to the capabilities they most need: loose coupling to accelerate responding, standards and platform independence to strengthen decision-making and modularity to support sensing. To realize these benefits, firms should embed these principles in organizational processes and routines rather than treating them as purely technical standards.
This study contributes to research on IT-enabled organizational agility by providing a microfoundational explanation of how SOA design principles enable sensing, decision-making and responding activities through recurring organizational processes. In doing so, it highlights decision-making agility as an important but underexplored manifestation of agility and shows how digital architectures shape organizational processes rather than influencing agility directly. By linking IT architecture research with dynamic capability theory, the study offers a process-oriented perspective on how digital infrastructures support adaptive organizational behavior.
