Senior Lecturer, Victoria University of Wellington
Dr Andreas Drechsler is Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington's School of Information Management. His current research interests revolve around Scaling Agile organisational contexts and related implications for and best practices of disciplines such as IT governance, business IT alignment, enterprise architecture, information security, project and #noproject management. He has published more than 30 papers on these and other topics in international academic journals and conferences.
This presentation outlines future pathways for the evolution of IT governance and the effective alignment of business and IT in (Scaled) Agile organisations. The findings are based on an international multi-year research project involving more than 15 early-adopter companies.
With digitalization leading to turmoil in many of today’s markets, many enterprises see the need to become more agile across their organization. They aim to become more customer-centric in order to deliver the ‘right’ products and services, to improve their ability to identify and react to market shifts and/or to increase their innovation capability to radically disrupt one or multiple market environments. Enterprises can adopt a variety of new organisational forms to support these outcomes, ranging from one or multiple separate digital units next to the IT function (bimodal IT) up to the establishment of semi-autonomous cross-functional teams with full responsibility and all necessary business and IT skills for developing and operating their products or services.
Traditionally, a key purpose of IT governance and business-IT alignment has been to bridge the realms of business and IT. However, with the lines between business and IT blurring (or disappearing entirely) in these new organisational forms, the roles of governing and aligning need to be reimagined in order to ensure a strong customer focus and business value orientation in the product and service provision in these new organisational environments. To support enterprises on their Agile transformation journeys, this presentation shows forms of and guiding principles for continuous governing and aligning in Agile organizational contexts.