working in an inter-organisational context: the relevance of it governance and business-it alignment

8/4/2019 Working in an Inter-Organisational Context: The Relevance of IT Governance and Business-IT Alignment

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(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,

Vol. 9, No. 8, August 2011

Working in an inter-organizational context: the

relevance of IT Governance and Business-IT

Alignment

Carl Stolze, Novica Zarvić, Oliver Thomas

Fachgebiet Informationsmanagement und Wirtschaftsinformatik University of Osnabrueck

Osnabrueck, Germany

.

Abstract—In an ever more globalized world value creation in

inter-organizational environments is more and more becoming

the norm. In this paper we examine the relevance of IT

governance and Business-IT Alignment in those inter-

organizational contexts. We compare practitioners’ andacademics’ evaluation of certain statements as a first stage of

research to look into potential differences in perception and

derive future research opportunities.

Keywords: enterprise architecture, alignment, governance

I. I NTRODUCTION

Through the combined forces of IT (information technology)

and globalization new value networks have been created -

value networks that cross the boundaries of organizations,countries and continents [4,9]. Within this changed

environment companies have not only to act faster, as even

small competitors from abroad can easily target a market, butthey also have to comply with new regulation whilst trying to

defend their competitive edge [17]. IT can serve as a means toan end in this context – as an enabling platform for business

advantages by allowing people and systems to connect across

organizations as well as with their customers [2,9]. Trends likecloud computing [3,10], sustainable IT [20] and social media

[10] are based on or require connectedness between

organizations and inter-organizational cooperation. The

thereby formed networks and its enabling IT become even

more vital for economic success [6]. Research suggests that in

collaborative settings the alignment between IT and business(Business-IT Alignment) as well as the establishment of the

respective governance structures (IT governance) is more

challenging than in non-collaborative ones [22].In any discipline, such as Information Systems (IS), the task of

universities is to create (through research) and distribute

knowledge (through teaching). Even so academics from the IS

discipline itself claim, there is a gap between academia and

practice [11]. Therefore before designing potentially problem-

solving artifacts, it might be advisable to check if certainresearch questions are actually helping to solve practical

problems [21]. In this paper we take the first step to examine

how relevant questions regarding IT Governance andBusiness-IT Alignment in collaborative settings are seen in

practice and academia.

II. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Enterprise architecture (EA) spans over multiple, diverse

topics. EA can be understood as an instrument to gain

overview and insight into today’s complex IT and businessoperations. Opposed to classical approaches the aim is to

provide a holistic, coherent and integrated form. Any

representation should enable cooperative understanding and

work on the topics under the umbrella of EA [17]. Among the

various topics, IT Governance and Business-IT Alignment can be seen as two aspects at the very core of any EA endeavour

or discussion [22]: Aligning enterprise and IT goals has been a

concern for academia and practice for over two decadesalready. Interrelated with Business-IT Alignment are the

questions of who is allowed to contribute to which decisions inwhich way [22]. Since the late 1990s the concept of IT

Governance emerged as the distinct conceptualization of those

questions [13] and its interrelated nature with Business-IT

Alignment [22].Inter-organizational contexts are increasingly becoming the

norm. Globalization, integrated supply chains, outsourcing,

sustainability endeavours among other trends have createdcomplex value networks in which companies operate

[4,5,9,15,18]. Therefore we are dealing, additionally and next

to intra-organizational relationships within single companies,

with inter-organizational relationships – business

arrangements that cross the boundaries of individual

enterprises [1]. The challenges to manage and coordinate theresulting inter-organizational dependencies become more

complicated, because there is no single decision point in suchnetwork arrangements. This is especially the case for

interrelated Business-IT Alignment and IT Governance

activities [22].

III. R ESEARCH METHOD

Relevance and rigor represent two critical aspects of IS

research. Relevance is usually defined as being practically

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useful, whereas the term rigor refers to the fact whether the

research was performed impeccably sound [12]. In this paper we aim at gaining first insights on how the relevance of certain

questions of EA is rated by academics and practitioners alike.

Thereby we test if research questions in this area are actuallyhelping to solve practical problems [7,21]. We strive to do so

in a rigorous fashion by conducting a multistage study into the

subject. In this paper we focus on the first stage: An initial

survey, send out to a selected subset of our global researchnetwork in form of a questionnaire and its answers. Even onthis very first stage, new scientific knowledge is created and

added to the knowledge base by this paper [21].

IV. SURVEY EXECUTION: DATA COLLECTION AND

I NTERPRETATION

A. Respondents

Our survey was conducted by sending an online questionnaireto a selected group of 83 persons within our global research

network. Out of these we got 18 completed questionnaires

returned, equating to a response rate of 21.7%. First, this

confirms that the underlying research related to a problem of interest for multiple entities [16]. Second, the response rate is

nearly exactly in the middle of the likely response rate span of

10% to 35% in IS research [8]. Thereby we regard the

response rate as acceptable.

The respondents to our questionnaire came from Germany,Brazil, Poland, Spain, Slovenia, The Netherlands, Italy and

USA. Half of the respondents are from research and academia

and the other half works in consulting, logistics or IT-relatedindustries, therefore answers are not biased by a specific

industry affiliation. The average work experience of the

respondents since their graduation is 7.28 years. An initial

proxy for the competence of the respondents is their academic

degree: 16.6% hold a doctoral degree (PhD), 66.7% a Master degree (or equivalent), 11.2% a Bachelor degree, leaving only

5.5% of the respondents without an academic degree (yet). For

the fields under investigation IT Governance and inter-organizational fields different levels of expertise have been

reported using a (Table 1).

Field of expertise Min Max Avg Std. dev.

IT Governance (research) 1 3 2.00 .686

IT Governance (practise) 1 3 1.89 .676

Inter-organizational Systems (IT/IS) 1 4 2.56 .784

Inter-organizational relationships

(organizational level)

1 4 2.72 .958

Inter-organizational Dependencies 1 4 2.39 .916

Table 1: Level of expertise in different fields

Within our sample the self-assessed expertise regarding inter-

organizational questions (systems, relationships and

dependencies) is higher than the one for IT governance on thefour-level Likert scale used. A value of 1 point is used to

represent complete disagreement whilst a value of 4 point

stands for complete agreement with a statement. At the same

time the standard deviation numbers show that the expertise

level for inter-organizational topics differs more than the

values regarding IT Governance.

B. Importance assessment

Using the same, before mentioned, scale we investigated into

the agreement to certain statements regarding importance and

effect of inter-organizational forms of collaboration (Table 2).

Statement Min Max Avg

Std.dev.

1. IT Governance is not important

for inter-organizational

relationships.

1 2 1.28 .461

2. Inter-organizational relationships

need specific IT governance

structures.

2 4 3.17 .707

3. Inter-organizational dependencies

do not affect IT.

1 4 1.61 .778

4. Inter-organizational systems (IT

level) are just a hype.

1 4 1.94 .998

5. Do you think the importance of

inter-organizational relationships

and dependencies will increase in

the future?

2 4 3.39 .698

Table 2: Level of agreement to statements regarding importance

The respondents negate the negating statement 1 without any

doubt as a maximum of 2 points and an average answer of 1.28 points show; therefore IT Governance should be seen as

absolutely important for inter-organizational relationships

(IORs). From the level of agreement to statements 2 and 3 weconclude that inter-organizational contexts (dependencies and

relations) do not only affect IT but they also require specific

IT Governance structures. At the same time inter-

organizational systems on the IT level are partially seen as just

a hype (statement 4). A twice as high standard deviation on

statement 4 compared to statement 1 points to different levelsof consensus on certain questions in this sample. The answers

to statement 5 lead to the understanding, that no respondententirely neglects an increasing importance of inter-

organizational relationships and dependencies in the future

(minimum of 2 points). Together with the high average

agreement to an increase of importance, we conclude the

importance of questions related to inter-organizational contextwill increase indeed and find this claim also confirmed in the

literature [19].

C. Business-IT Alignment and IT Governance

To investigate the understanding of challenges and difficultiesregarding Business-IT Alignment and IT Governance in inter-

organizational contexts we asked about the agreement to fivestatements using the same scaling as before (Table 3).

High agreement is given on average to statement 6; thereby

the respondents see Business-IT Alignment as more difficult

in inter-organizational contexts. A minimum of 2 indicates nocomplete disagreement with this statement. Although the

difficulties are seen, current practices are seen critical in terms

of their maturity (statement 7). An average agreement of 2.44 points, with both extreme values having ticked by respondents,

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ISSN 1947-5500





points to a topic worth further discussion and research.

Compared to that, an average agreement of 3.00 points onstatement 8 allows concluding IT Governance and Business-IT

Alignment are seen indeed as interrelated and interdependent.

This finding is also in line with the published theory on thisfield [22].

Statement Min Max Avg

Std.

dev.

6. Business-IT Alignment is much

more difficult in an inter-organizational context than in

individual companies.

2 4 3.33 .767

7. Current Business-IT Alignment

practices are sufficiently mature

for networked business

arrangements (inter-

organizational relationships).

1 4 2.44 .856

8. IT Governance and Business-IT

Alignment are two topics thatare interrelated and affect each

other.

1 4 3.00 .840

9. Inter-organizational

dependencies (e.g. relying on business partners and their

processes and systems)

represent an important aspect

with respect to IT Governance.

2 4 3.06 .725

10. Inter-organizational

dependencies (e.g. relying on

business partners, their

processes and systems)represent an important aspect

with respect to Business-IT

Alignment.

1 4 2.94 .938

Table 3: Level of agreement to statements regarding importance

The dependency on partners as being an important aspect to IT

governance (statement 9) is agreed to at an average of 3.06 points with a minimum of 2 points. Being not neglected

entirely by any respondent, the level of agreement supports the

statement. A different picture is drawn for Business-IT

alignment and inter-organizational dependencies being an

important aspect (statement 10): here the average is below 3 points at 2.94 with a nearly 30% higher standard deviation.

Together with the also occurring total disagreement, this

statement seems to need further discussion to reach consensusamong the respondents. These differences are surprising to a

certain extent as the interrelated nature of IT governance and

Business-IT Alignment (statement 8) had been largely agreed

to. On the other hand there was also no consensus about that,

therefore different opinions might also be accountable for thedifferent assessment of being an important aspect.

D. Differences between Academia and Practice

As exactly half of the respondents have a practical background

and the other half comes from academia and research, wecompared the average levels of agreement of both groups

(Figure 1). Although the gap between academia and practice

seems to be not that big in general, there are certain

differences.

Figure 1. Comparing average levels of agreement between academia and

practice

Interestingly, the claim of inter-organizational dependencies

not affecting IT receives stronger support from academia thanfrom practice (statement 3). Therefore academics see inter-

organizational systems on the IT level more as being just ahype (statement 4). Practitioners are more supportive for thestatement of Business-IT alignment being more difficult in

inter-organizational contexts (statements 6) than academics. In

light of this, the assessment of maturity of current practices

(statement 7) is unsurprisingly the other way round. The

different perception of the interrelated nature of Business-IT

Alignment and IT Governance came quite unexpected(statement 8) after the before mentioned results.

V. CONCLUSION

In this paper we strived to examine if there is a gap betweenacademia and practice regarding questions of IT Governance

and Business-IT Alignment in collaborative settings. Althoughthere is no general gap between the two spheres of practice

and academia, there are subtle but important differences in the

perceptions of certain aspects. Especially the difference aboutthe perceived maturity of existing artifacts calls for further

application-oriented research [14] – especially true in light of

the assessment that the importance of inter-organizationalcontexts will increase. As a next step we will conduct expert

interviews before a more comprehensive questionnaire will be

send out to validate the interpretations from this paper.

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AUTHORS PROFILE

Carl Stolze is Researcher and doctoral candidate in the InformationManagement and Systems Group at the University of Osnabrück, Germany.

He earned a diploma degree in Information Systems from the University of

Münster, Germany. His current research interests include IT Governance and

Business Process Management with a special focus on the human factor and practical applicability.

Novica Zarvić is Researcher and doctoral candidate in the Information

Management and Systems Group at the University of Osnabrück, Germany.He earned his Master of Science degree in Information Engineering from theUniversity of Osnabrück and a diploma degree in Information Systems from

the FHTW Berlin (University of Applied Sciences). His research interests

focus on Business-IT Alignment and IT Governance in the area of

Collaborative Business Networks.

Prof. Dr. Oliver Thomas is chair of the Information Management Group at the

University of Osnabrück, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Information

Systems as well as his Habilitation and Venia Legendi on ProcessEngineering, both from Saarland University, Germany. His research interests

focus among others on Business Process Management, Enterprise Architecture

Management and Product-Service Systems.


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working in an inter-organisational context: the relevance of it governance and business-it alignment

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