Carol V. Brown’s research while affiliated with Stevens Institute of Technology and other places

Similar to other Western healthcare systems, the U.S. has sought to build a national infrastructure to enable widespread electronic health information exchange (HIE). The 2009 U.S. HITECH Act׳s State HIE Cooperative Agreement Program (SHIECAP) was a short-term catalyst for bottom-up HIE initiatives by states and regional health information organizations (HIOs). Given the high failure rates of regional U.S. HIOs in the past, our primary objective is to identify the key characteristics of HIO startups that became operational and demonstrated sustainability with non-renewable SHIECAP funding in a state environment with very minimal prior HIE activities.

An executive IT leadership position, often with a Chief Information Officer (CIO) title, emerged in the 1980s as organizations became increasingly dependent on IT for business operations and strategic initiatives. This article focuses on what we have learned about the IT executive role beginning with conceptual and descriptive research from the 1990s. More recent researchers have developed frameworks for categorizing IT executive roles and IT leadership approaches using a contingency lens and field-based data. Future studies could benefit from research designs that take a more holistic view of the IT leadership context within a given organization, as well as the potential impacts on the IT executive role due to changes in the technology landscape.

Although increased information systems (IS) development outsourcing is the trend, many of these arrangements fail to meet client expectations. We take a coordination perspective and adopt an information processing lens used by prior organization theorists to conceptualize sets of formal structural and informal nonstructural mechanisms, and predict their positive impacts on the strategic IT benefits achieved by the client. Utilizing a strategic alliance lens, we also predict that two characteristics of the client-vendor arrangement will moderate the impacts of both sets of coordination mechanisms. We test our hypotheses using hierarchical regression techniques on field survey data collected from 141 IS managers in client firms, responsible for IS development outsourcing arrangements. We found that the implementation of both structural and informal mechanisms positively impact the client's strategic IT benefits. In arrangements with greater resource provisioning by the vendor, the positive impacts of informal governance mechanisms are strengthened. In arrangements with higher values similarity, the positive impacts of structural governance mechanisms are strengthened, but the positive impacts of informal mechanisms are weakened. A post-hoc analysis of a mediation model reveals that values similarity also has a positive relationship to both structural and informal governance mechanisms. This study therefore provides empirical support for the validity of an information processing lens to theorize lateral mechanism solutions to the coordination challenges of IS development outsourcing. Implications for research and practice are discussed, including the need for future research to better understand how client managers evolve sets of formal and informal mechanisms over the life of an outsourcing arrangement to achieve strategic objectives for their IT organization.

This study addresses a major gap in our knowledge about the allocation of information technology (IT) decision rights between business and IT units at the application level, including the governance of applications delivered on-premise versus those delivered with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Building on the findings from a multicase qualitative study of organizations that had adopted the same SaaS application, we draw on three theoretical lenses (agency theory, transaction cost economics, and knowledge-based view) to develop a theoretically grounded model with three organization-level factors, three application-level factors, and application-level IT governance. Hypotheses derived from the model, as well as a set of differential hypotheses about factor influences due to on-premise versus SaaS delivery, are tested with survey responses from 207 firms in which application-level governance is operationalized with two dimensions: decision control rights (decision authority) and decision management rights (task responsibility). Three antecedents (origin of the application initiative, scope of application use, business knowledge of the IT unit) were significantly associated with application governance postimplementation, and the on-premise/SaaS subgroup analyses provide preliminary evidence for the mode of application delivery as a moderator of these relationships. Overall, this study contributes to a growing body of research that takes a more modular approach to studying IT governance and provides theoretical explanations for differing application-level governance designs.

This chapter presents a new model for assessing the maturity of a ­customer–provider relationship from a collaborative service delivery perspective: the Customer–Provider Strategic Alignment Maturity (CPSAM) Model. This model builds on recent research for effectively managing the customer–provider relationship in IT service outsourcing contexts and a validated model for assessing alignment across internal IT service units and their business customers within the same organization. After reviewing relevant literature by service science and information systems researchers, the six overarching components of the maturity model are presented: value measurements, governance, partnership, communications, human resources and skills, and scope and architecture. A key assumption of the model is that all of the components need be addressed to assess and improve customer–provider alignment. Examples of specific metrics for measuring the maturity level of each component over the five levels of maturity are also presented. KeywordsService system maturity framework-IT outsourcing-customer–provider strategic alignment-customer–provider relationship management-collaborative service delivery-IT services alignment

Introduction Organizations are becoming increasingly serious about the notion of "data as an asset" as they face increasing pressure for reporting a "single version of the truth." In a 2006 survey of 359 North American organizations that had deployed business intelligence and analytic systems, a program for the governance of data was reported to be one of the five success "practices" for deriving business value from data assets. In light of the opportunities to leverage data assets as well ensure legislative compliance to mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act and Basel II, data governance has also recently been given significant prominence in practitioners' conferences, such as TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) World Conference and DAMA (Data Management Association) International Symposium. The objective of this article is to provide an overall framework for data governance that can be used by researchers to focus on important data governance issues, and by practitioners to develop an effective data governance approach, strategy and design. Designing data governance requires stepping back from day-to-day decision making and focusing on identifying the fundamental decisions that need to be made and who should be making them. Based on Weill and Ross, we also differentiate between governance and management as follows: • Governance refers to what decisions must be made to ensure effective management and use of IT ( decision domains ) and who makes the decisions ( locus of accountability for decision-making ). • Management involves making and implementing decisions. For example, governance includes establishing who in the organization holds decision rights for determining standards for data quality. Management involves determining the actual metrics employed for data quality. Here, we focus on the former. Corporate governance has been defined as a set of relationships between a company's management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders that provide a structure for determining organizational objectives and monitoring performance, thereby ensuring that corporate objectives are attained. Considering the synergy between macroeconomic and structural policies, corporate governance is a key element in not only improving economic efficiency and growth, but also enhancing corporate confidence. A framework for linking corporate and IT governance (see Figure 1) has been proposed by Weill and Ross. Unlike these authors, however, we differentiate between IT assets and information assets: IT assets refers to technologies (computers, communication and databases) that help support the automation of well-defined tasks, while information assets (or data) are defined as facts having value or potential value that are documented. Note that in the context of this article, we do not differentiate between data and information. Next, we use the Weill and Ross framework for IT governance as a starting point for our own framework for data governance. We then propose a set of five data decision domains, why they are important, and guidelines for what governance is needed for each decision domain. By operationalizing the locus of accountability of decision making (the "who") for each decision domain, we create a data governance matrix, which can be used by practitioners to design their data governance. The insights presented here have been informed by field research, and address an area that is of growing interest to the information systems (IS) research and practice community.