Track

Accounting Information Systems

Abstract

Organizations today engage in various forms of alliances to manage their existing business processes or to diversify into newprocesses to sustain their competitive positions. Many of today’s alliances use the IT resources as their backbone. The resultsof these alliances are collaborative organizational structures with little or no ownership stakes between the parties. Theemergence of Web 2.0 tools is having a profound effect on the nature and form of these alliance structures. These alliancesheavily depend on and make radical use of the IT resources in a collaborative environment. This situation requires a deeperunderstanding of the governance of these IT resources to ensure the sustainability of the collaborative organizationalstructures. This study reports on the first stage of this initiative. It suggest the types of IT governance structures required forcollaborative organizational structures. Semi-structured interviews with senior executives who operate in such alliancesreveal that co-created IT governance structures are necessary. Such structures include co-created IT-steering committees, cocreatedoperational committees, and inter-organizational performance management and communication systems. The findingspave the way for the development of a model for understanding approaches to governing IT and evaluating the effectivenessfor such governance mechanisms in today’s IT dependent alliances.

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