Many organizations struggle to measure, control, and manage agility in a manner of continuous improvement. Therefore, we draw on Design Science Research to develop and test a tool for Continuously Assessing and Improving Agile Practices (CAIAP). CAIAP helps agile practitioners to monitor the alignment of “as is” agile practices on individual, team levels with the overall agile strategy of the organization. To develop CAIAP, we first empirically gather requirements, draw on the ICAP framework to base the tool development on a solid conceptual and theoretical basis. CAIAP helps agile practitioners to constantly monitor their agile practices on individual and team levels and to identify areas for improvement to gain greater organizational agility. To researchers, CAIAP helps to make the unit of analysis of agile work explainable, predictable and helps researchers to guide their own empirical research as well as serve as a basis for designing further tool support.

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With looming uncertainties and disruptions in today’s global supply chains, such as lockdown measures to contain COVID-19, supply chain resilience has gained considerable attention recently. While decision-makers in procurement have emphasized the importance of traditional risk assessment, its shortcomings can be complemented by resilience. However, while most resilience studies are too qualitative in nature and abstract to inform supplier decisions, many quantitative resilience studies frequently rely on complex and impractical operations research models fed with simulated supplier data. Thus there is the need for an integrative, intermediate way for the practical and automated prediction of resilience with real-world data. We therefore propose a random forest-based supervised learning method to predict supplier resilience, outperforming the current human benchmark evaluation by 139 percent. The model is trained on both internal ERP data and publicly available secondary data to help assess suppliers in a pre-screening step, before deciding which supplier to select for a specific product. The results of this study are to be integrated into a software tool developed for measuring and tracking the total cost of supply chain resilience from the perspective of purchasing decisions.

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The Swiss Journal of Business Research and Practice invited submissions related to the question of how the digitalization may shape the future of work. The rapid development of innovative digital technologies and the associated digital transformation have changed the way in which we live, communicate, and work. Digital platforms and the increasing pursuit of becoming more effective and flexible have affected many traditional work structures within and across organizations. Work is potentially becoming more distributed, flexible, and autonomous. At the same time, many approaches of digital work are associated with inferior working conditions, low payment, or even increasing surveillance (Durward et al. 2020, Aloisi/Gramano 2019). Phenomena such as artificial intelligence, smart devices, or robotics might further accelerate these developments and could lead to an augmentation and automation of knowledge work - work that requires extensive education and training and that is today performed by humans. Similarly, organizations and management practices may become more digital such that new jobs, roles, and skill profiles as well as innovative modes of management and leadership could emerge. These developments will not only impact individuals and organizations, but also our society in its entirety.

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Agile work organization has experienced a significant increase in acceptance in recent years. However, literature falls short in explaining the transformation process that results from the implementation of agile work organization as a means of achieving increased adaptability, rate of speed and flexibility. We apply a process ontology to agile work organization by following three multinational firms that apply agile work organization, utilizing a case study approach over three years. At the macro level, our theory describes the transformation process set in motion by agile work organization as a three-phase process. At the micro level, we show that this transformation process is driven by specific design decisions on individual elements. Thus, our process theory contributes to a better understanding of agile work organization as a means to achieve organizational agility and to STS theory by showing that the emergence and constitution of STS are mainly driven by micro-level processes.

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Many organizations struggle to measure, control, and manage agility in a manner of continuous improvement. Therefore, we draw on Design Science Research to develop and test a tool for Continuously Assessing and Improving Agile Practices (CAIAP). CAIAP helps agile practitioners to monitor the alignment of “as is” agile practices on individual, team levels with the overall agile strategy of the organization. To develop CAIAP, we first empirically gather requirements, draw on the ICAP framework to base the tool development on a solid conceptual and theoretical basis. CAIAP helps agile practitioners to constantly monitor their agile practices on individual and team levels and to identify areas for improvement to gain greater organizational agility. To researchers, CAIAP helps to make the unit of analysis of agile work explainable, predictable and helps researchers to guide their own empirical research as well as serve as a basis for designing further tool support.

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