Revisiting IT Governance in the Light of Institutional Theory

Abstract

IT governance research has been largely normative and has provided a great deal of useful insight into what effective IT governance should be. What has received less attention is an understanding of what really happens as organizations struggle to achieve effective IT governance. We argue that the time has come to supplement the important research on what IT governance should be with research on how IT governance is actually accomplished. Before moving forward we take a step back. We trace the evolution of IT governance research and the shared theoretical base. We then suggest institutional theory as a promising alternative for answering three questions yet to be fully addressed in the literature: (1) how is IT governance actually done?; (2) what are the links between IT governance and performance?; and (3) how does IT governance change over time?