The academic community and IT governance: a rant

Just picked up a copy of the extremely promising book IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results. It's by two MIT professors (Weill and Ross), who assert: "There has been little field-based research on IT governance, and few publications help managers understand the issues involved in designing effective governance structure and processes."

I've been thinking this for a while, and it's good to have validation from these two - it's a pretty damning assertion, actually. I have been a subscriber to both the ACM and IEEE digital libraries, and have monitored table of contents/abstract notifications from Elsevier for publications like Information Management, Information Sciences, Data & Knowledge Engineering, Information Processing & Management, Information Systems, and the International Journal of Information Management. I have also periodically checked on the Journal of Management Information Systems, and the Springer-Verlag publications. (Am I missing any other credible academic journals/publishers?)

With a few exceptions I have found the results generally irrelevant to the issues I've been exploring in this weblog, and which face me as a professional practitioner. Now, I don't expect a first-rank computer science journal like the ACM's Transactions on Computer Systems to cover applied management of IT, just as I would not expect a physics journal to go into details on electrical engineering. But I can't for the life of me figure out the applied MIS (as in business-school, MBA concentration) research priorities. One concern I have is whether the academic MIS folks are spending too much time mulling over problems that are properly the domain of their colleagues in Computer Science departments. We need the applied perspective, just as materials science is an application of physics and chemistry, and merits its own journals. There are huge openings for research and theory in IT governance, enterprise architecture, business/IT alignment, and more. Where is it? Thoughts? Am I missing something?

-ctb

P.S. One exception I must note is Christopher Verhoef and his work on Quatitative IT portolio management. Paradoxically, this appeared in the ACM Journal Science of Computer Programming. Great article, but the publication choice makes NO sense at all to me - this is the kind of thing I would expect to see in an MIS-focused journal.

Comments

[Essive]

As an IT architect in a fortune 50 company I cannot agree more with your comments. Academic MIS is completely misguided focusing on practitioners and not governance. And, frankly, to answer your questions - the research is not there. In fact, much of what we do in MIS / IT is very ad hoc, unstructured and self-created with little academic guidelines. Why is this? Is the fundamental IT employee / manager a result of the last 20 years of grassroots MIS growth?

I find it even personally disturbing that I can call myself an architect. What do I base that on other than salary? Have I had formal systems architecture training other than what I have learned in the field? No. I think this is true for most of the industry except for common practitioner certifications.

[DemianE]

Why indeed? Here are a few attempts:

- The most obvious reason is that the disciplines of Porfolio Management and IT Governance are still unfolding
- The folks who actually know how to do it are busy DOING it and not WRITING about it
- The folks who write about it are not close enough to the trenches to see how it works
- The solution innovators are driven by sales and marketing and not by sharing what they have learned
- The analysts are compromised because they are paid by solution vendors to distribute the vendors' marketing messages
- Alphabet soup has people confused...what exactly IS the differece between IT Porfolio Managment and IT Governance and a PMO?

The good news: organizations that partner with vendors to develop solutions will begin to publish case studies with big benefits and that will attract attention. Studies will follow. In the mean time, you are one of the lead scouts in the uncharted territories...