Rethinking the Concept of Organizational Readiness: What Can IS Researchers Learn from the Change Management Field?

The organizational readiness construct has been investigated in information systems (IS) research for more than two decades and has yielded tremendous insights on topics such as IS organizational adoption, IS organizational use and institutionalization, IS project success, and knowledge acquisition and sharing. Notwithstanding the strong implications of this construct for our discipline, a critical and comprehensive assessment of the conceptualization of organizational readiness in IS research has not yet been conducted. Thus, this review article proposes to fill this gap and reflects on the conceptualization of organizational readiness in prior IS literature. Building upon the recommendations made by change management theorists, it proposes a new, yet multi-dimensional conceptualization of organizational readiness, including two overarching dimensions and nine sub-dimensions. We discuss how the proposed conceptualization is likely to offer a richer understanding of this construct in the IS discipline.