IT Governance and its Mechanisms
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ItemDigital Infrastructure, Business Unit Competitiveness, and Firm Performance Growth: The Moderating Effects of Business Unit IT Autonomy( 2020-01-07)This 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.
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ItemAgility matters! Agile Mechanisms in IT Governance and their Impact on Firm Performance( 2020-01-07)With 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.
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ItemIT Governance: Oil or Sand in the Wheels of Innovation?( 2020-01-07)The 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.
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ItemCan Enterprise Architecture Be Based on the Business Strategy?( 2020-01-07)Enterprise 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.
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ItemDiscovery of Microservice-based IT Landscapes at Runtime: Algorithms and Visualizations( 2020-01-07)The 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.