How to Implement Agile IT Setups: A Taxonomy of Design Options

The digital transformation requires organizations to rethink how they interact with customers, define value propositions, leverage data, and organize internal operations. Evolving into an indispensable part of value creation, IT organizations are required to not only plan, build, and run IT services in the safe and steady mode, but also to enable organizations seizing digital op-portunities in an agile and adaptive mode. Despite mature knowledge on IT organizations, am-bidextrous IT, and agile methods, there is high uncertainty on how to implement bimodal IT organizations. To address this gap, we propose a taxonomy of design options for the agile mode. Our taxonomy includes seven dimensions (i.e., scope, institutionalization, accountability, governance, location, staffing, and technical in tegration) that address relevant questions re-garding the design of agile IT setups. While creating our taxonomy, we built on extant literature and involved experts from various organizations (e.g., Chief Information Officers, Digital Trans-formation Officers, and Managing Directors of IT departments). These experts did not only vali-date our taxonomy regarding real-world fidelity and understandability, but also applied it to classify the agile IT setups of their organizations. Thus, our study contributes to descriptive knowledge and delivers practically relevant insights into existing agile IT setups.