Information technology and the search for organizational agility: A systematic review with future research possibilities

•IT-enabled organizational agility is consistently ranked by CIOs as a top concern.•Research on IT-enabled agility primarily uses the resource based view or an IT capabilities perspective.•Studies have evolved through four stages (descriptive, nomological, contextual, and refinement).•Sensemaking theory could offer insights into how firms sense and respond to change.•Decision agility is the bridge between sensing and responding to change. Organizations are increasingly turning to information technology (IT) to help them respond to unanticipated environmental threats and opportunities. In this paper, we introduce a systematic review of the literature on IT-enabled agility, helping to establish the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know. We base our review on a wide body of literature drawn from the AIS Basket of Eight IT journals, a cross-section of non-Basket journals, IT practitioner outlets, and premier international IS conferences. We review the use of different theoretical lenses used to investigate the relationship between IT and organizational agility and how the literature has conceptualized agility, its antecedents, and consequences. We also map the evolution of the literature through a series of stages that highlight how researchers have built on previous work. Lastly, we discuss opportunities for future research in an effort to close important gaps in our understanding.