Sustaining Agility in IS Portfolios–A Critical Realist Study

ABSTRACT Research into adapting portfolio practices for large‐scale agile environments has not kept pace with the growing interest in extending agile practices to the enterprise level. Although several agile scaling frameworks offer portfolio practice recommendations, their longer‐term effectiveness is unclear, given the lack of rigorous theoretical foundations. Consequently, it is uncertain how these practices sustain agility and optimise value realisation from their Information Systems investments. This study adopts a systems‐theoretic approach to identify causal mechanisms that sustain agility within enterprise IS portfolios. Using a critical realist perspective, we analyse existing IS portfolio practices from three distinct enterprises to evolve an explanatory framework comprising two generative mechanisms and a structural arrangement of portfolio practices that help achieve sustained portfolio agility by sensing, assessing, learning from, and responding to changes in its internal and external environments while ensuring a sustained flow of business value. In addition to being a comprehensive tool for practitioners designing and diagnosing agile IS portfolio capabilities, our results extend existing theoretical approaches to understanding agility at the portfolio level and provide opportunities to refine existing models to address the dynamic complexities of IS portfolio agility.