IT Governance in Organizations Facing Decentralization - Case Study in Higher Education

Decentralization of organizations and subsequent change of their management and operation styles requires changes in organization’s processes and heavily involves the IT. A case study in the Higher Education sector in Sweden has shown that Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks fit to primarily centralized organizational structures, and as such have shortcomings when used in decentralized organizations. Overcoming these deficiencies requires some new principles to be introduced and incorporated into the EA knowledge. In particular for IT governance, the case study showed that the peer-to-peer principles, such as peer production, can offer more suitable governance over current EA frameworks as they are able to better match the decentralized components of the university’s organizational structure.