Information Systems Management

Governance, Urbanization and Alignment

Daniel Alban, Philippe Eynaud, Julien Malaurent, Jean-Loup Richet, Claudio Vitari

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781848218550
• eBook ISBN: 9781119608189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Information Technology
• Index: Computer Science

Information Systems Management is intended to sensitize the heads of organizations to the issues raised by information systems (IS). Through its pedagogical presentation, the book ensures that issues related to IS are not left solely to the experts in the field. The book combines and analyzes three key concepts of IS: governance, urbanization and alignment. While governance requires the implementation of a number of means, bodies and procedures to manage IS more effectively, urbanization involves visualization methods to enable the manager to take into account the different levels of the organization of an IS and their coherence. Finally, alignment assesses the ability of the IS to make a significant contribution to the organization's strategy.

PART 1
Governing the Stakeholders

Introduction to Part 1

The first part of this book sets offers information systems stakeholders a reflective contribution to the possible future developments in their roles and responsibilities. In this part, we will sketch a portrait of the stakeholders in information systems (IS) governance. We will show how today’s stakeholders are driven to seek shared mechanisms for organization, decision-making and audits in order to anticipate successive technological innovations. This sharing is particularly important, to the extent that it is considered a priority in the strategic agenda of organizations. We will show that IS governance encompasses the complexity of the issues arising within organizations (value creation, skills sharing, capitalization of knowledge, etc.).

In Chapter 1, we will address the issue of technological change and describe its impact on the collective organization of IS stakeholders. We will highlight, in particular, the semantic shifts in the job title of this function, which provides evidence both of the growth in opportunities provided by technology and of the acknowledgment of its strategic importance within the organization. Chapter 2 will show the link between global organizational governance and IS governance. We will identify three separate theoretical approaches that enable us to take stock of the issues related to information systems management. We will then consider information systems through, in turn, taking stock of transaction costs [WIL 81], the concept of a hybrid coalition organization [AOK 01, AOK 10] and the prospect of the coming together of an organization’s stakeholders [FRE 10a, FRE 10b]. Chapter 3 will conclude this first part with a consideration of the practicalities of implementing IS governance. We will describe the organizational forms of governance and good practice benchmarks relating to IS, which are most frequently used as guidelines during implementation and whilst achieving compliance.

1
Information Systems Stakeholders

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The Fundamentals

1. 1) Technological developments stimulate change to organizational models while at the same time changing production models.
2. 2) The issues raised by information systems (IS) involve all the human actors within organizations, because they are at the heart of every goods and services production and distribution process.
3. 3) The interface between human actors and technical tools calls for a complex, global approach to IS.

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The ubiquitousness of digital tools in both our professional and our personal environments makes the concept of IS stakeholders difficult to grasp. Indeed, a corollary of the widening scope of digital transformation is the increase in the number of stakeholders involved. Thus, when we talk about IS stakeholders, we are referring not only to those responsible for the creation and maintenance of information services. We are also referring to all users whose roles and significance have grown steadily along with the development of information and communication technologies (ICT). By facilitating horizontal operating models, ICT has brought about a profound change in the relationships between the human actors within organizations. ICT has led to a greater decentralization of operations, a peer-to-peer operating model and a decrease (or even disappearance) of middle management who in theory are responsible for supervising those involved in production. We may have talked about the “flattening” of organizations through the generalized use of ICT, with a reduction in the number of reporting levels required. IS users (no matter what their role is within the organization) become key stakeholders in IS governance. In the same way, ICT has helped empower end users by involving them in the production of IT services. The widespread adoption of the so-called “agile” methodologies can be cited as proof of this. But when considering IS stakeholders, we must also take into account the technological tools deployed within organizations. Because they are closely interwoven into the heart of production processes, information reporting and audits, these tools are fundamentally linked to the business activities of today’s organizations. As such, these tools have the potential to influence the cognitive capacity of the human actors and to change the way they perceive their environment. It can thus be seen that the concept of stakeholders in information systems, and how to define them, is complex. After describing the development of the technological environment of IS stakeholders, we will seek to show the impact of this development on organizational management. We will then be able to start categorizing IS stakeholders and define the unit of analysis required in order to conduct appropriate IS management.

1.1. The technological environment of IS stakeholders, and its development

Four successive “technological waves” have marked out the history of IS. In the 1970s and 1980s, the IS was centered around what we call “proprietary systems” whose application code was inaccessible to the user. Workstations were slave terminals with no local resources, connected to a central computer (mainframe or “host”) on the master-slave model. This earliest period can therefore be described as “host-centric”.

The 1980s and 1990s were fertile in innovation. The integration of organizational IS led to new, networked patterns of work organization and production. These innovations included, for instance, the emergence of client–server (C/S model) applications. From that point on, the C/S model combined two approaches: client-centric (where resources are managed locally) and server-centric (where resources are centralized). The C/S model assumes implementation of departmental computer systems based on workstations connected to each other by a local network (the invention and rapid adoption of Ethernet technologies). The C/S model was also contemporaneous with the development of relational databases and their associated methodologies (entity-relationship model, SSADM, Prince, Merise methodology) and the advent of the first EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) applications (the birth of Business to Business or B2B e-commerce) using extended networks. The development of EDI was a precursor to the progression of organizational IS into inter-organizational IS, supporting the coordination of logistical flows of increasingly networked businesses.

The 1990s and 2000s built upon the previous wave’s widespread adoption of ICT. This marked the beginning of the network-centric era. This period was founded on the significant development of networking technologies and the coming of age of the Internet, already firmly established in academic circles. The era was characterized by the birth and growth of intranets (for internal communications and subsequently for all business processes) and extranets dedicated to the opening up of IS to external stakeholders on a massive scale (introduction of business portals). The environment became fully distributed, and the work on the internal integration of the company’s IS was effected in the context of wide area networks, in terms of both technology (networks) and economics (networking), boosted by the widespread availability and massive adoption of Internet technologies. This period saw the appearance of entirely new and innovative relationships between the organization and all its stakeholders, in the form of the openness of IS and connectivity with customers (e-commerce with consumers, Business to Consumer – B2C), partners (B2B), partners as stepping stones to clients (Business to Business to Consumers – B2B2C), employees (Business to Employees, B2E), administration (Business to Administration – B2A) and so on, not forgetting shareholders and the general public, through dedicated institutional websites.

During 2000–2015, we saw the development of cloud computing. Using a combination of virtualization architectures and distributed operating models, these technologies led to growth of the market for advanced services. Packages on offer were varied and allowed for graduated outsourcing of services. The SaaS (Software as a Service) model is the best known, but other packages were available: Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The cloud-centric period is oddly reminiscent of the initial host-centric period. There is no need for the user to have significant local resources. The service provider supplies users with all the resources they need and centralizes them to satisfy the requirement for user integration, with the added conveniences of rolling out the service and providing basic training, which did not exist in the initial period, but which is now made possible by the higher speeds offered by telecommunications.

This astonishing technological evolution, significant in terms of its vastness, its intensity and its rapidity, has had three major consequences for organizations: a profound redefinition of IS and their impact, an astonishing shift in the uses of computing and a radical change in the computer–user relationship. This is the aspect which we will now consider.

Figure 1.1. The technological waves

1.2. Impact of the developing technologies on organizational management

The technological waves discussed above led to IS undergoing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART 1: Governing the Stakeholders
• PART 2: Urbanizing the Territories
• PART 3: Project Alignment
• Conclusion: Management of Information Systems in its Complexity
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement