• Home
• News
• Resources
• Books
• Glossary
• Archives
• Blog
• About
• Contact

The academic community and IT governance: a rant

July 17, 2005 @ erp4it from alphasong

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

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

Copyright © 2007 PMToolbox :: Tools and Resources for Project Management