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Influencing the effectiveness of IT governance practices through steering committees and communication policies

  • Original Article
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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Information technology (IT) governance practices involve efforts by an organization's leadership to influence IT-related decisions through the location of decision rights and the structure of decision processes. Our focus is on two specific aspects of IT governance: IT steering committees and IT-related communication policies. Adopting an inductive research strategy examining qualitative data, we provide evidence on the influence of these governance practices from three small-/medium-sized organizations. While each firm evidenced a centralized IT governance posture, differences in these firms’ IT steering committees and governance-related communication policies were found to explain differences in the firms’ IT use outcomes. Inferences from our findings are presented in the form of propositions informing future research.

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Notes

  1. Are IT decisions made by corporate-level IT/business senior managers (i.e., centralized), corporate and divisional senior managers (i.e., hybrid) or divisional senior managers (i.e., decentralized)?

  2. Are senior managers involved through formal IT steering committees (i.e., formal involvement) or informal personal interactions (i.e., informal involvement)?

  3. The number and types of communication channels used and the primary communication channel used to communicate IT policies, guidelines and procedures.

  4. How efficient the firm has been in its use of IT (i.e., efficiency of IT use), the number of distinct operational areas identified where IT is being appropriately used (i.e., breadth of current IT use) and the number of distinct operational areas identified as being actively considered or planned for future IT use (i.e., breadth of potential IT use).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, State University of New York, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, U.S.A.

    Rui Huang

  2. Michael F. Price College of Business, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, U.S.A.

    Robert W Zmud & R Leon Price

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  1. Rui Huang
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  2. Robert W Zmud
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  3. R Leon Price
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Appendix

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Table A1 Variable operationalization
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Huang, R., Zmud, R. & Price, R. Influencing the effectiveness of IT governance practices through steering committees and communication policies. Eur J Inf Syst 19, 288–302 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2010.16

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