IS Resilience in SMEs in Post-Earthquake Christchurch

Over recent years, the concept of resilience has gained increasing support within the academic community. Given the potentially devastating implications of disruptions, understanding the dynamics of successful adaption of Information Systems (IS) within organisations yields an important avenue for future research. Our business world is in need of adventurous thinkers and dynamic leaders to identify and follow through on the best methods of managing commercial challenges. This paper is an initial attempt to develop a conceptual framework for IS resilience, with regard to the factors that affect the decision-making of IS managers and planners. Through this, a conceptual framework of an Information Systems resilient organisational response is presented. We adopt Agency theory to develop a conceptual framework, which supports decision making and planning for IS resilience. Concourse Theory and Q-methodology are adopted to develop a Q-sort questionnaire, which is refined by interviews with researchers, IS managers, and IS planners. The result is a 34-item Q-sample regarding IS resilience in SMEs. This research makes a methodological contribution by the development of a Q-sort questionnaire that may be used to study decision making and planning in the context of IS resilience. This methodological contribution will eventually enable theoretical contributions by establishing a framework that may be used to characterize planning and decision making in the context of IS resilience. Finally, conclusions are presented and attention is drawn to the implications of this instrument development for future research on IS resilience and planning.