Services Grid Competence As Driver of Business Agility in Turbulent Environments - A Conceptual Model in the Financial Services Industry

In recent years, Grid computing has gained considerable attention in industry leading to the vision of a new agile business platform which provides the on-demand access to IT resources. In this article, we refer to the current trend of financial services providers to utilize Services Grids in order to increase the level of business agility in terms of improved environmental sensing and responding capabilities. These capabilities especially address environmental turbulence as a major source of uncertainty and unpredictability. Deductively drawing from the extant literature and informed by the insights of a conducted case study within a large bank, we develop a conceptual model and propositions depicting the interaction between Services Grid competence as driver of business agility. In this context business agility can be assumed to be an antecedent of improved financial firm performance, especially against the background of environmental turbulence.