Conceptualizing Supply Chain Resilience: The Role of Complex IT Infrastructures

Abstract

To deal with environmental uncertainty, organizations need resilience to respond to disruptions, such as changing market conditions or variations in demand or supply, while avoiding large scale adjustments. The concept of resilience is ambiguous, often explained as the capability of an organization or a supply chain to recover its original state, within an appropriate time frame, after being disrupted. Resilient supply chains have event handling capabilities, can provide efficient responses, and can return to their normal operating performance, after the disruptive event. To increase their resilience, companies often make changes or adjustments to their internal IT infrastructure, which may temporarily disrupt their smooth operation. As a result, contemporary IT infrastructures are mixed and include varied systems or technologies. Although new technologies, including blockchain, IoT and cloud-based solutions, may facilitate the handling of changes by providing secure, low cost and scalable solutions, more traditional systems may hinder such changes. Therefore, the relationship between IT and supply chain resilience is still unclear. The paper intends to examine the above issues by adopting a socio-technical approach to explain the concept of supply chain resilience and investigate the role of IT. More specifically, based on previous literature and on the appreciative systems thinking theoretical perspective, the paper develops a theoretical framework to analyse the organisational and/or supply chain resilience. It then uses this framework to examine and explain the impact of IT, by identifying important characteristics of an IT infrastructure and examining whether they may support or hinder business resilience.