The Information City: A Framework For Information Systems Governance

Modern organizations face many external constraints arising from an external environment characterized by various economic, political, and technology-related forces that reshape business dynamics. Many authors have emphasized that information technology plays a critical role in maintaining competitive advantage of organizations. Agile Information systems are among the instruments proposed by academics and practitioners to help organizations in managing continuous change and overcoming problems induced by external pressures. Nevertheless, building an agile information system able to support the continuously changing organizational processes – is a difficult task notably because, in each organization, information system is a stack of applications developed using methods, languages, and tools which corresponds to different periods and technology eras. The heterogeneity of information systems makes difficult both the maintenance and evolution of existing applications or the development of new applications that must be integrated in the information system. Many solutions have been proposed by academics and practitioners in order to help organizations build agile information systems. Despite their richness, the proposed solutions don’t consider the relationships between information systems agility and information systems governance. In this paper, we propose a framework based on the city landscape metaphor which links enterprise architecture and information systems governance.