面對日趨活躍的跨領域互動潮流與日益縮短的產品生命週期及市場反應時間等三項因素，全球產業普遍面臨越來越嚴峻的競爭環境，企業因應變化和不確定性的挑戰越來越大。在這種情況下，企業為了能夠持續存活及維繫本身的競生優勢，他們必須要用一種更為敏捷的方式來回應環境中的變化和不確定性。敏捷策略代表的就是一種將「從市場上取得的訊息回饋並融入到公司的價值鏈內」的策略，它的目的是讓企業能夠更迅速調整自身的資源來回應市場的狀況。儘管目前對敏捷策略有許多不同的看法，但實際上「敏捷」所代表的意義仍然找不到一個如同「精實生產」一樣具體而明確的說法。本研究建立於個案研究的基礎之上，來找出企業在面對不同的競爭條件以及產業條件之下所會採用的敏捷策略的模式及作法。 研究發現，即便是被認為敏捷範例的企業，它們仍然不一定全方位的採行敏捷策略。公司根據企業在管理上的複雜度，選擇專注於商業環境中的特定面向來導入敏捷作為。本研究發現，所有個案公司在四個敏捷面向中至少採行其中兩個面向。首先，內部組織和文化面向皆調整為允許並提升靈活性和適應性。接著，公司透過調整經營和生產面向來相增加企業的靈活性和適應性。除了調整內部的運作之外，這些公司會依據公司的核心優勢或是在其他面向管理的複雜度來決定應該處理哪一個外部運作面向。本研究發現當企業面臨複雜的供應網絡時，他們會嘗試將資源分配來跟合作夥伴建立敏捷關係;另外，只有企業只有在必須直接及快速面對並回應快速變化的客戶或市場的需求時，他們才會將資源分配以便能夠敏捷地將客戶的聲音和市場的訊息融入產品或服務。 / As global business environment is experiencing much fiercer competitions from the increased interactions across country and industry boundaries, shorter product life cycle, shorter respond time, more variation and uncertainties are becoming major challenges to corporations nowadays. The increased competition forces companies to react to changes and uncertainties in an agile way, in terms of connecting resources internally and externally, in order to survive and to sustain their competitive advantages. Agility represents a strategy for companies to integrate information on the market into their value chain, making it easier and faster for the companies to leverage their resources and capabilities to respond to market situations in a quick manner. Despite the evolvement of different agility viewpoints, the concept of agility has yet to be solidly defines as it has been done on such concepts as lean manufacturing. On the basis of a multiple case study, this paper aims to identify the ways companies could adapt the agility strategy under different competitive circumstances based on the companies’ and their corresponding industries’ situation. The study finds that even companies recognized as agile examples are not performing all-around comprehensive across all aspects of agility. Companies choose to concentrate on specific agility dimensions based on the companies’ actual complications managing the business environment. However, commonalities exist when all case companies are found to perform practice agilely in two of the four dimensions. The internal organization and culture dimension is adjusted to allow flexibility and adaptability. Furthermore, the companies increase the companies’ versatility and adjustability by adjusting the operations and manufacturing dimension. On top of the adjusted internal operation, the companies should then decide to focus on the external environment that is complicated to manage or is fatally related to the companies’ core competencies. It is found only companies with complicated supply network would attempt to allocate resources into establishing agile relationship with their partners; and only companies with direct pressure to react to fast changing customer or market demand would allocate resources into agilely adapting customers’ voices and/or market information into their products or services.

Today’s enterprises are operating in a highly complex environment with rapid disruptions from different areas such as technology, regulations or market, all of them capable of bringing the entire industry upside down. And many large organizations are adopting agile software development methods as part of their continuous push towards higher flexibility and shorter lead times. Agility, however, introduces challenges and problems for the engineering of enterprises, yet few reports on organizational alignment in this regard are available in the literature. This problem of alignment between business/operations and IT has been around for as long as computers have been introduced to the work offices and is still today an important issue for enterprises of any kind. This thesis, therefore, tries to investigate the lack of insight or fragmented knowledge regarding organizational design or architecture of modern enterprises in both academia and industry. The purpose of this thesis is to explicate the challenges and recommendations found in research papers, industrial whitepapers and interviews in order to propose guidelines for achieving better alignment. The goal of this thesis is to provide an inventory of available researches in the area of Business and IT Alignment (BITA) and organizational science in order to help suggest a basis for future research. For this purpose, a Design Science Research (DSR) strategy has been followed in combination with a literature review accompanied by two rounds of interviews as a means for data collection and evaluation. The artefacts resulting from this thesis take the form of fifteen guidelines extracted using coding analysis from the literature review and a first round of interviews at a major Swedish vehicle manufacturing enterprise. The guidelines were subsequently evaluated in a second round of interview with an industry expert reviewing the correctness and usefulness of the guidelines. The results of the evaluation proved that guidelines were useful for both the academia and industry experts. Hence, enabling the author to claim that a tentative proposition has been achieved. / Dagens företag arbetar i en mycket komplex miljö med snabba störningar från olika områden som teknik, regler eller marknader, som alla kan vända hela branschen upp och ner. Och många stora organisationer använder sig av agila programvaruutvecklingsmetoder som en del av deras kontinuerliga tryck mot högre flexibilitet och kortare ledtider. Agilitet eller snabbfothet medför emellertid utmaningar och problem för konstruktion av organisationer, men få rapporter om organisatorisk anpassning i detta avseende finns tillgängliga i litteraturen. Detta problem med anpassningen mellan verksamhet och IT har funnits så länge datorer har introducerats på arbetsplatserna och är än idag en viktig fråga för organisationer av alla slags. Denna avhandling försöker därför undersöka bristen på insikt eller fragmenterad kunskap om organisationsdesign eller arkitektur hos moderna företag i både den akademiska världen och såväl industrin. Syftet med denna avhandling är att beskriva de utmaningarna och rekommendationerna som finns i forskningspapper, industriella vitböcker och intervjuer för att föreslå riktlinjer för bättre anpassning. Målet med denna avhandling är att tillhandahålla en inventering av tillgängliga forskningar inom området Business and IT Alignment (BITA) och organisationsvetenskap för att kunna föreslå en grund för framtida forskning. För detta ändamål har en Design Science Research (DSR) strategi följts i kombination med en litteraturstudie åtföljd av två intervjuomgångar som ett medel för datainsamling och utvärdering. Artefakterna som härrör från denna avhandling har formen av femton riktlinjer extraherade med hjälp av kodningsanalys från litteraturstudien och en första intervjuomgång hos ett stort svenskt fordonstillverkningsföretag. Riktlinjerna utvärderades därefter i en andra intervjuomgång med en branschexpert som granskade riktigheten och användbarheten av riktlinjerna. Resultaten av utvärderingen visade att riktlinjerna var användbara för både akademin och branschexperter. Därför gör det möjligt för författaren att hävda att en preliminär proposition har uppnåtts.