The role of IT Governance in digital operating models

Abstract

Many researches have dedicated their work in IT Governance and numerous methods, techniques and tools for making decisions to align IT to a business strategy were proposed in the last decade. In the meantime new digital business models developed rapidly and aligning business with IT have become more difficult ever. Governance frameworks are widely used to reduce complexity in the decision making process and organisations tend to use several topic related governance frameworks beside IT Governance. Different governance frameworks are related, dependent and interact under each other and since they all have their own method of measurement and evaluation, the interaction suffers of a lack of data consistency or they do not take all dimensions of decision making into account. Furthermore the lack of consistency is caused by definition of governance frameworks itself and lead to concurring goals among governing bodies. This paper proposes a design goal for a method of measurement by (1) critically review the existing state of art of measurement and evaluation concepts of governance frameworks by following a comprehensive review of the normative literature dealing with the measurement aspects of IT Governance and (2) analysing a dataset (n=51) of a preliminary study done in spring 2017 with Swiss companies.