Digitalisation in the Public Sector

Digitalisation in the public sector has attracted the attention of political and administrative leaders as well as researchers. Empirical studies suggest that most of the digitalisation efforts fail to achieve the intended efficiency, transparency, and responsiveness of the public sector. While digitalisation is a hot research agenda, only a few studies explored the issue in public organisations. This study, therefore, attempts to address the gap in the literature and identify the factors influencing digitalisation in the public sector. A case study is conducted at one of the largest state-owned enterprises in Liberia, the National Social Security and Welfare Corporation (NASSCORP). The data collected through interviews and examination of internal documents were analysed thematically. The study resulted in the identification of 13 factors influencing digitalisation in the public sector, which are related to technology, organisation as well as the environment. The contribution of the study to research and practice is presented along with the potential future research opportunities.

Rethinking the Concept of IT Governance

The concept of information technology governance (ITG) was developed with foundations in organizational studies on corporate governance, but with a central element (information technology/information systems) in the field of information systems (IS). The ITG concept has become broad and ambiguous with inaccurate assessments leading researchers to adopt a nominal view of the theme. The ITG has a weak theoretical and ontological basis and its concept in the literature is not clear. Thus, the authors established as a research aim to analyze and discuss the composition of the ITG concept in an interdisciplinary perspective. The literature of governance, corporate governance, and IS were used as the basis for the analysis of the formation of the ITG concept. ITG studies were consulted and 79 textual corpora were analyzed in light of the techniques of content and lexical analysis. The analyses allowed rethinking the concept of ITG by considering that the theme must include both governance mechanisms and have a central element that represents the Information Technologies or Information Systems.

Measuring Business-IT Alignment in a Digitally Revolutionized Economy

Although the concept of business-IT alignment was once considered one of the most important concerns of organizations, in terms of IT administration, the attention it has received has decreased significantly over the years. This article postulates that strategic alignment initiatives still have the same relevance—in particular for non-IT companies—which means that digital transformation strategies should consider the strategic alignment as a critical issue for their success. Therefore, the persistent relevance of this concept and the need to measure it with updated instruments capable of assessing the degree of maturity reached and feeding back the results to the organizations remains a key topic in IT administration. Based on an updated instrument, adequate for a digital framework, our study surveyed a sample of mostly large Chilean companies. The results obtained reveal the importance to count with an improved model that captures the changes this new digital scenario imposes.

IT Backsourcing

With the growing importance of IT as competitive advantage, companies aim to increase their digital transformation activities. Consequently, companies are also revisiting their existing IT sourcing arrangements. In the article at hand, the authors explore the concept of IT backsourcing by presenting the results from a quantitative online survey with global IT practitioners. The authors confirm that backsourcing is frequently applied in practice, with key reasons being dissatisfaction with service or relationship quality and higher than expected costs. Further, the authors identify IT services with an increased likelihood of being backsourced, e.g., application development or data center, and discuss the effect of a CIO change on the backsourcing decision. In addition, the authors show that there are differences in the perceptions on the antecedents and the results of backsourcing decisions between management and operational level. The authors conclude with practical implications for IT managers based on their findings.

How to Improve Board Accountability in ISO/IEC 38500 Based on IT Governance Implementations

With the standardization of Information Technology (IT) governance through ISO/IEC 38500 in the last decade, a good number of organizations have implemented IT governance (ITG) frameworks. Although it is not a fully extended practice. Given the fact that the use of balanced score cards (BSC) on ITG is not an unknown practice, the application of BSC in the implementation of ISO/IEC 38500 has been given less importance, since it normally appears as just examples of good practices. This work not only explains why the BSC's applicability to align IT with business in ISO/IEC 38500 implementations is not included in the standard, but also justifies the importance of BSC to report to the board or senior executive team in a clear way, without the details of the particular implementation framework of the standard. Thus, a framework that allows implementing IT BSCs within the context of IT governance is proposed, cascading objectives included in the strategic map through the tactical and operational level and backwards on the construction of the KPIs to better monitor IT.

A Data Privacy Governance Model

The importance of data privacy, information availability and integrity are increasingly recognized. The new EU general data protection regulation 679/2016 obligates stringent legal requirements with high sanctions for noncompliance. Most organizations worldwide are affected directly or indirectly. It requires overall a risk and evidence-based data privacy management as part of corporate governance. More than 1.6 million organizations worldwide are implementing a standard-based management system, such as ISO 9001 or others. To implement the new data protection regulation in an effective, efficient and sustainable way, the author provides design-oriented guidelines on how to integrate the legal requirements into standard based management systems. The holistic data privacy governance model integrates different information security governance frameworks with standard based management systems in order to comply the regulation. In that way data privacy is part of all strategic, tactical and operational business processes, promotes corporate governance, legal compliance and living data protection.

Diminishing the Gap Between IT Governance Maturity Theory and Practice

IT governance research suggests the existence of a gap between theoretical frameworks and practice. Although current ITG research is largely focused on hard governance (structure, processes), soft governance (behavior, collaboration) is equally important and might be crucial to close the gap. The goal of this study is to determine what IT governance maturity models are available and if there remains a mismatch. The authors conducted a systematic literature review to create an overview of available IT governance maturity models. The study shows five new IT governance maturity models were introduced. Only one of the new IT governance maturity models covers hard and soft IT governance in detail. This model and corresponding instrument was used to illustrate its usability in practice. The authors demonstrate that combining the instrument with structured interviews results in a usable instrument to determine an organization's current maturity level of hard and soft IT governance.

Inter-Organizational IT Governance Research

The current operational environment for organizations is changing, which has effects on IT functions and IT activities. Various forms of networks, collaborations, and alliances are operational models, which organizations are using to an increasing extent. This reality has brought with it a need for improved IT governance (ITG). ITG research for inter-organizational arrangements will be needed. In the research, the target is to identify the current state of the inter-organizational ITG research among the information systems (IS) domain. The literature review covers academic articles and conference proceedings during this millennium. The findings of the current literature review reveal that interest towards ITG research is still quite limited. The future view of inter-organizational ITG research is quite clear: more research will be needed in the inter-organizational area, which is the current playground for several organizations today.

IT Governance in SMEs

The adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) leads to cost reduction in processes and organizational effectiveness. The effective use of ICTs, however, greatly depends on their good governance, especially due to the impact generated by investments in information and communication technologies. In this scenario, we aimed at defining the state of art of IT governance in SMEs. A broad review of the literature on IT governance in SMEs was performed. The results indicated a field of research with little development, with 32 studies identified until the year 2018. Three research lines were observed. Initially, the researchers have discussed the barriers and characteristics of ITG in SMEs. In the next step, the studies were directed to the establishment of an ITG framework applicable to SMEs reality. The last line of research observed the IT capacities in relation to the environment in which the SME operates. The studies indicated a prevalence of qualitative approaches under the positivist paradigm.

Organizational Structure's Influence on Business-IT Alignment

Despite the long list of cumulative research, business-IT alignment remains to be evasive for practitioners and researchers. As organizations continue to spend a significant amount of their resources on IT to improve the variety and quality of services, achieving and maintaining business-IT alignment is a timely issue. Studies indicate that organizational structure, among other factors, plays an important role on whether organizations succeed in achieving business-IT alignment. A systematic literature review is conducted to provide an overview of previous studies as well as point out possible future research directions. A total of 31 articles were identified and included in the review. The findings indicate that there are few studies poised to address the lack of knowledge on how the formal/informal organizational structure's influence on business-IT alignment. The study presents a summary of previous findings on organizational structure's influence on business-IT alignment and identifies potential future research directions.