Can IS/IT Governance Contribute for Business Agility?

Abstract

Business agility is the ability to answer quickly to internal and external changes, either reactively or proactively, in an efficient and effective way. As markets experience sudden changes and meeting requirements and expectations of several stakeholders requires quicker process improvements, business agility becomes a fundamental factor, one of the most decisive in turbulent environments for organizations to succeed. Therefore, it comes to no surprise that business agility has become one of the top 10 most important organizational concerns for IT management. Given the important and increasing crucial role of information systems and information technology (IS/IT) for business performance, IT management should be concerned in providing agility to the business while striving to keep business and IT strategically aligned. To achieve business-IT alignment, organizations need to set up processes for decision making regarding the effective and efficient management of information systems and information technology, i.e., IS/IT Governance. Governance means rules, organizational procedures, supervision, monitoring and control. On the other hand, agility requires degrees of freedom to decide and make changes in the business processes. The possible tension between IS/IT Governance and Business Agility may be a result of the conflict between adaptation and anticipation. While Governance requires planning, anticipation, supervision and control, agility requires high degrees of adaptation, many times, under unforeseen circumstances. In this work, we propose a conceptual model to look into the contribution of IS/IT Governance for Business Agility.