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...the success of organisations. For example, Malaysian firms were particularly effective at using IT/IS for mastering change, leveraging resources, and cooperating to compete but they were not yet fully able to use IT/IS effectively to enrich their customers, particularly to provide information about competitors, to reach their target customers, to fulfill customer needs and wants, and to enable information to be accessible to all employees. Therefore, Malaysian managers need to be more aware of these shortfalls and work toward remedying them to increase their firm's agility.
Introduction
In today's borderless world, the rapid growth of information technology/computerised information systems (IT/IS) has facilitated communication and the exchange of information on an unprecedented scale. IT/IS has become a useful way to cope with today's volume and complexity of data. It helps in management decision-making in order to make sure that the strategy is well followed according to the firm's corporate mission and objectives plan. Previous researches by Zain (1995) and Zain and Rickards (1996) have found that more innovative Malaysian firms are more responsive to change and the implementation of technologies. However, as technology becomes more matured compared to when it was first introduced, management has changed its focus on controlling the business rather than the technology. The focus here is to make sure that companies stay agile in their respective markets and whether this agility could be enhanced by using IT/IS.
The word "agile" is defined by Webster's New World Dictionary & Thesaurus (1997) as "quick and easy of movement" and "deft and active". Thus, we define firms that are agile as those that are able to manage change quickly and easily in order to survive, particularly in a turbulent environment. For example, firms need to be fast and lean and be responsive to change as it leads to growth in profitability. Historically, the agility of firms was first identified by Goldman, Nagel, Preiss, and Dove (1991) in their 21st Century Manufacturing Enterprise Strategy report. According to them, agility focuses on the use of IT/IS to provide strategic directions and capabilities to help organisations to be competitive to face change. It is about having strategic management to help a company to stay long and flexible in facing uncertain and unpredictable changes. As a result, the presence of IT/IS is to ensure that the company will improve its efficiency in getting jobs done with minimum waste, to be effective in selling its products or services, and to be able to build up a loyal and expanding customer base. Moreover, the traditional modes of business operations are being unshackled in favour of high-speed transmissions and interactive communications across the national boundaries and hence, firms are able to join global markets. The IT/IS revolution is upon us.
However, to be agile, firms need to have strategic agility planning that will indirectly form a structure to fulfill customer needs by offering the right products and services at the right time with the right quantity. For example, airlines are among the first to use the technology. In the early days of the airline industry, travelling reservations and other transactions were done manually. But in the late 1950s, in the United States, American Airlines realised that the manual way could not keep up with fast growing customer-base. To overcome the problem, the company established a joint project with IBM to develop an automated on-line airline reservation system. This system has given the company a huge competitive advantage vis-a-vis other airline companies so much so that the computerised reservation system is widely used by other airlines as well (Neo, 1988; Niketic and Mules, 1993; Lucas, 1997).
The success of the usage of an IT/IS system can be measured in terms of its success in generating information to achieve its strategic objectives, and therefore it is essential for the organisation to create an appropriate information management strategy and systems infrastructure to support it (Bentley, 1998). According to Wilson (1997), decisions are made in support of the organisation objectives and nowadays information is required to be handled more freely and openly. For example, IT/IS lets the management build systems and provide tools to extract information from online databases to support decision-making. Another previous study has reported that the implementation of IT/IS was solely done to get ahead of the competition (Thierauf, 1993)
Therefore, the primary objective of this preliminary study was to determine whether IT/IS contributes to management decision-making, which later could result in making the firm more agile. The research was conducted on firms from various types of businesses and industries operating in Malaysia. Agility, according to Mates, Gundry and Bradish (1998) is a widespread strategy set by firms to face unpredictable changes and to be competitive in their respective market. Thus, firms need...
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