On Increasing Service Organizations' Agility: An Artifact-Based Framework to Elicit Improvement Initiatives

The present research focuses on operational agility in service organizations, which are subject to variability through customers, service providers, suppliers, or unexpected events. As such, their management teams may face challenges in understanding their agility-related assets and success metrics, and furthermore in defining the scope of work for improvement initiatives. Previous research offers quite general insights into agility-related capabilities, practices, obstacles, or (agility-related) information quality evaluation. Yet, management teams need specific practices and techniques in order to improve operational agility capabilities, and thus increase their sustainable performance. We propose a conceptual framework and an artifact-centric algorithm that elicits and prioritizes improvement initiatives by (a) understanding agility-related assets by modelling operational business artifacts, (b) determining agility bottlenecks by identifying quality issues in operational artifacts, and (c) eliciting and prioritizing improvement initiatives to increase artifact quality. The framework application is discussed through a case study in a company operating in the rail freight industry, in which a set of initiatives to improve operational agility capabilities is obtained and prioritized. We conclude that the proposed algorithm is an applicable and relevant tool for management teams in service organizations, in their operational agility improvement endeavors.