Digital governance mechanisms and principles that enable agile responses in dynamic competitive environments

Giovanni Vaia, Daria Arkhipova and William DeLone

European Journal of Information Systems, 2022, vol. 31, issue 6, 662-680

Abstract: Being an agile company today is no longer just about timely recognition of early signs of change in order to defend an existing competitive position but rather being able to perpetually transition between a series of short-lived, temporary competitive advantages. While traditional IT governance approaches have lent themselves well to extracting value from a long-lasting competitive advantage, they can become a liability if agile companies need to continuously reinvent themselves in pursuit of a new, “transient” competitive advantage. To that end, a temporal dimension of IT governance (when and how fast to decide) becomes as important as its structural (who decides what) and procedural (how to decide) aspects. In this paper, we adopt a “ternary” view on governance and build on the extant literature in IS, strategy, and organisation design as well as exemplar case studies to explore how traditional approaches to IT governance structures, processes, and relational mechanisms are altered to improve sensing, deciding, and responding capabilities in turbulent business environments. These mechanisms are then summarised into four digital governance principles to guide future research and practice. Those principles are: 1) disciplined autonomy, 2) IS-Business convergence, 3) permeable boundaries, and 4) incremental financial commitment including fast experimentation.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0960085X.2022.2078743 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tjisxx:v:31:y:2022:i:6:p:662-680

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tjis20

DOI: 10.1080/0960085X.2022.2078743

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Information Systems is currently edited by Par Agerfalk

More articles in European Journal of Information Systems from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().