Today agility of management cannot be realized unless given all of the following three kinds of quickness: a) quick recognition of environmental changes, b) quick decision-making on countermeasures against these changes, and c) quick implementation of the countermeasures chosen. In the business world nowadays the quickness of a) concerns information that an MIS deals with, the quickness of b) concerns use of an MIS for decision-making, and the quickness of c) concerns change of an MIS itself. With a focus on c) and assuming that flexibility is a core property that an MIS should acquire to realize agile management, our study aims to clarify how MIS flexibility should be enhanced. With this aim in mind, we will survey the sources and types of change demands on an MIS and consider in a structured way the characteristics that an MIS should have, such that they will conduce to its flexibility in dealing with these change demands. Having laid the groundwork mentioned so far, we will discuss practical methods to enhance MIS flexibility, and end by presenting our evaluation procedure for MIS flexibility.

In this paper, we have focused on and presented the following: the causes of change demands on an MIS, the internal and ex external factors that an MIS should maintain to cope with change demands, and the procedure for evaluation of MIS flexibility via analysis of the relationship between the internal and external factors.

Specifically, we have elucidated the following:

• MIS flexibility is an index of the ability of an MIS to absorb future change demands on it.
• MIS flexibility can be evaluated quantitatively in terms of the substitute index of POC (penalty of change).
• MIS flexibility consists of internal and external factors. Evaluation of external factors focuses on the volume of change demands an MIS can absorb, and evaluation of internal factors focuses on the variety of strategies to evade change risks. We have treated POC as a common index to evaluate the two categories of MIS flexibility factors.
• External factors of MIS flexibility are constrained by internal factors.
• Renovation of MIS infrastructure means application of information technology for evasion of change risks accompanying MIS implementation.
• Proper renovation of MIS infrastructure will enhance the internal characteristics of MIS flexibility.

The challenges confronting us ahead are the detailed and practical studies on the following:

• quantitative relationship between each internal and external factor,
• behavior of cost and utility of MIS use and MIS infrastructure on the time axis.