Information Systems Management

2 From Global Governance to IS Governance

The Fundamentals

1. 1) IS governance is related to organizational governance.
2. 2) IS governance has major implications for all the organization’s business activities. Therefore, defining their objectives is a prerequisite.
3. 3) The practical implementation of the terms of governance should not be overlooked, since its medium- and long-term impacts have a strategic dimension.

In Chapter 1, we saw that technological change had implications regarding the number of stakeholders involved in IS governance and the roles they play. We also highlighted the need for IS stakeholders to be appropriately positioned in line with the chosen development path in terms of information systems. In Chapter 2, we will put forward an integral vision of the organization as a whole. The purpose of this chapter is to take global organizational governance as our starting point and deduce from that the purpose and nature of IS governance. This will lead us on to a consideration of the coherence of organizational models on these two levels of governance and to questions relating to the dual status of information systems. In fact, information systems provide perceptional tools for both the internal and external environment of an organization (feedback systems) and action models for this same environment (service production systems), all at the same time. This means the quality of global governance may suffer in the case of poor IS governance. After reviewing the ...