IT Governance and its Mechanisms
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Item Digital Infrastructure, Business Unit Competitiveness, and Firm Performance Growth: The Moderating Effects of Business Unit IT Autonomy(2020-01-07) Queiroz, Magno; Tallon, Paul; Coltman, Tim; Sharma, RajeevThis study examines the benefits that firms accrue from digital infrastructures that are effective in supporting corporate and business unit strategic objectives—which we term digital infrastructure effectiveness. We hypothesize that digital infrastructure effectiveness influences two types of performance outcomes—namely, business unit competitive performance and firm performance growth. We further hypothesize that these relationships are both moderated by the degree of business unit IT autonomy. Using data from an international survey of multi-business firms, we find that business unit IT autonomy exerts differential moderation effects on the relationships between digital infrastructure effectiveness and the two types of performance outcomes. As business unit IT autonomy increases, the effect of digital infrastructure effectiveness on business unit competitive performance gets stronger, while its effect on firm performance growth gets weaker. The primary contribution of this paper is explaining how and when digital infrastructures influence business unit performance and firm performance growth.Item Agility matters! Agile Mechanisms in IT Governance and their Impact on Firm Performance(2020-01-07) Vejseli, Sulejman; Rossmann, Alexander; Connolly, ThomasWith significant advancements in digital technologies, firms find themselves competing in an increasingly dynamic business environment. It is of paramount importance that organizations undertake proper governance mechanisms with respect to their business and IT strategies. Therefore, IT governance (ITG) has become an important factor for firm performance. In recent years, agility has evolved as a core concept for governance, especially in the area of software development. However, the impact of agility on ITG and firm performance has not been analyzed by the broad scientific community. This paper focuses on the question, how the concept of agility affects the ITG–firm performance relationship. The conceptual model for this question was tested by a quantitative research process with 400 executives responding to a standardized survey. Findings show that the adoption of agile principles, values, and best practices to the context of ITG leads to meaningful results for governance, business/IT alignment, and firm performance.Item IT Governance: Oil or Sand in the Wheels of Innovation?(2020-01-07) Arikan, Maral; Borgman, HansThe purpose of this study is to understand how IT Governance (ITG) can foster or hinder the development and roll-out of radical or disruptive IT-enabled innovations. Propositions derived from the extant literature guide the analysis of seven embedded case studies of different innovation initiatives within a single large Dutch multinational bank with various contingency factors affecting ITG across the cases. Our findings confirm and extend earlier studies that emphasize the importance of proper business-IT communication and identify challenges caused by long gatekeeping processes and by the use of novel technologies in a traditional IT landscape. Radical or disruptive innovations also add new challenges, as they often cross business lines and therefore may be exposed to a heterogeneous set of ITG mechanisms. Our study further demonstrates that these innovations demand a different approach on an IT-functional level and a reconsideration of the risk capability structure to optimize efficiency.Item Can Enterprise Architecture Be Based on the Business Strategy?(2020-01-07) Kotusev, Svyatoslav; Kurnia, Sherah; Taylor, Paul; Dilnutt, RodEnterprise architecture (EA) is a set of documents describing various aspects of an organization from an integrated business and IT perspective. EA facilitates information systems planning and helps improve business and IT alignment. Traditionally, the concept of EA was closely coupled with the business strategy and mainstream EA methodologies recommend starting the EA effort from documenting the business strategy and then using it as the basis for defining the required structure of information systems. This conceptual paper discusses in detail four practical problems with the business strategy that question its value as the basis for EA initiatives. The presence of these problems challenges one of the most cherished beliefs or even axioms of the EA discipline: that EA should be based on the business strategy. This paper raises a number of questions regarding the information inputs necessary for the EA effort and calls for further research in respective directions.Item Discovery of Microservice-based IT Landscapes at Runtime: Algorithms and Visualizations(2020-01-07) Kleehaus, Martin; Corpancho, Nicolas; Matthes, Florian; Huth, DominikThe documentation of IT landscapes is a challenging task which is still performed mainly manually. Technology and software development trends like agile practices and microservice-based architectures exacerbate the endeavours to keep documentation up-to-date. Recent research efforts for automating this task have not addressed runtime data for gathering the architecture and remain unclear regarding proper algorithms and visualization support. In this paper, we want to close this research gap by presenting two algorithms that 1) discover the IT landscape based on historical data and 2) create continuously architecture snapshots based on new incoming runtime data. We especially consider scenarios in which runtime artifacts or communications paths were removed from the architecture as those cases are challenging to unveil from runtime data. We evaluate our prototype by analyzing the monitoring data from 79 days of a big automotive company. The algorithms provided promising results. The implemented prototype allows stakeholders to explore the snapshots in order to analyze the emerging behavior of the microservice-based IT landscape.Item Enhancing Information Governance with Enterprise Architecture Management: Design Principles Derived from Benefits and Barriers in the GDPR Implementation(2020-01-07) Burmeister, Fabian; Huth, Dominik; Drews, Paul; Schirmer, Ingrid; Matthes, FlorianBusinesses today are increasingly dependent on how they transform information into economic value, while simultaneously being compliant with intensified privacy requirements, resulting from legal acts like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a consequence, realizing information governance has become a topic more important than ever to balance the beneficial use and protection of information. This paper argues that enterprise architecture management (EAM) can be a key to GDPR implementation as one important domain of information governance by providing transparency on information integration throughout an organization. Based on 24 interviews with 29 enterprise architects, we identified a multiplicity of benefits and barriers within the interplay of EAM and GDPR implementation and derived seven design principles that should foster EAM to enhance information governance.Item Artifacts, Activities, Benefits and Blockers: Exploring Enterprise Architecture Practice in Depth(2020-01-07) Kurnia, Sherah; Kotusev, Svyatoslav; Taylor, Paul; Dilnutt, RodEnterprise architecture (EA) is a collection of artifacts describing an organization from an integrated business and IT perspective and intended to improve business and IT alignment. The purpose of this study is to identify benefits and blockers associated with specific EA-related activities and respective artifacts. Most existing studies discuss the benefits and problems of EA practice in general without relating them to specific activities constituting EA practice. This study is based on 18 interviews with architects and leverages the grounded theory approach. As a result of our analysis, we identify eight consistent activity areas constituting EA practice. Each activity area implies certain activities supported by some EA artifacts leading to specific benefits often impeded by some blockers. Our analysis indicates that EA practice includes many diverse activities usually, though not always, closely associated with specific types of EA artifacts. Moreover, benefits and blockers of EA practice are also very activity-specific.Item Ambidextrous IT Governance Enactment in Healthcare: A Comparison between the Swedish and Ugandan Setting(2020-01-07) Kizito, MichaelIT Governance is advocated as a necessary prerequisite for effective digitalization by research and practice alike. Despite this, there are but few studies of IT Governance in the healthcare sector, and even fewer on the enactment of IT Governance. This paper reports on a comparative case study of a Swedish and Ugandan setting on the enactment of ambidextrous IT governance within healthcare. Ambidextrous IT Governance is perceived as governance designed to balance targets of efficiency and innovation, and the study is informed by the resource orchestration logic. The findings show a set of challenges and opportunities in both settings such as complexity in the sharing of information in the Swedish setting and the possibility to leapfrog in the Ugandan. Furthermore, the ambidextrous balancing point and aspired shift differed significantly between the two settings, where the Ugandan setting wanted to rebalance toward exploitation and the Swedish setting toward exploration. The paper concludes with a discussion and a call for future research on ambidextrous IT Governance.Item Business-IT Alignment in the Era of Digital Transformation: Quo Vadis?(2020-01-07) Jonathan, Gideon Mekonnen; Rusu, Lazar; Perjons, ErikFor the last four decades, the alignment of business and IT strategies also referred to as business-IT alignment (BITA), has been recognised as one of the top concerns for leaders. The current digital transformation journey undertaken by most organisations, however, triggered a new approach to planning and executing business and IT strategies as well as pursuing BITA. A systematic literature review is conducted to capture the paradigmatic shift in research and practice. A total of 94 articles published between 2014 and 2018 were identified searching through databases known to index reputable IS journals and conference proceedings. The analysis of the review revealed the continued conceptual debate on BITA construct as well as new research topics. The significance of digital strategy, enterprise architecture models, as well as intelligent IT systems to enable elicitation, implementation and assessment of activities enabling BITA are garnering the attention of researchers. Potential research directions are presented.Item Introduction to the Minitrack on IT Governance and its Mechanisms(2020-01-07) Van Grembergen, Wim; De Haes, Steven