Don’t Just Lead Govern: Effective IT Governance
(Research Seminar, May 1, 2003)
MIT Sloan School of Management
IT governance is the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT. Effective IT governance encourages and leverages the ingenuity of all the enterprise’s people in using IT, not just the leaders, while ensuring compliance with the enterprise’s overall vision and principles. Firms use a variety of archetypes (e.g. Business or IT Monarchy, Federal, Duopoly, Feudal or Anarchy) to govern different IT domains (e.g. investment, architecture, principles, applications and infrastructure). The complexity and difficulty of explaining IT governance is one of the most serious barriers to improvement. The session will present a framework for effective IT governance derived from a new CISR study of 250 enterprises in 22 countries. The presentation and discussion will examine typical governance patterns and highlight how the best performing firms differed significantly from the typical firm