Refine
Year of publication
- 2016 (2) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- no (2)
Keywords
- Shadow IT (2) (remove)
ERP systems integrate a major part of all business processes and organizations include them in their IT service management. Besides these formal systems, there are additional systems that are rather stand-alone and not included in the IT management tasks. These so-called ‘shadow systems’ also support business processes but hinder a high enterprise integration. Shadow systems appear during their explicit detection or during software maintenance projects such as enhancements or release changes of enterprise systems. Organizations then have to decide if and to what extent they integrate the identified shadow systems into their ERP systems. For this decision, organizations have to compare the capabilities of each identified shadow system with their ERP systems. Based on multiple-case studies, we provide a dependency approach to enable their comparison. We derive categories for different stages of the dependency and base insights into integration possibilities on these stages. Our results show that 64% of the shadow systems in our case studies are related to ERP systems. This means that they share parts or all of their data and/or functionality with the ERP system. Our research contributes to the field of integration as well as to the discussion about shadow systems.
The IT unit is not the only provider of information technology (IT) used in business processes. Aiming for increased performance, many business workgroups autonomously implement IT resources not covered by their organizational IT service management. This is called shadow IT. Risks and inefficiencies associated with this phenomenon challenge organizations. Organizations need to decide how to deal with identified shadow IT and if the business or the IT unit should be responsible for corresponding tasks and components. This study proposes design principles for a method to control identified shadow IT following action design research in four organizational settings. The procedure results in an allocation of IT task responsibilities between the business workgroups and the IT unit following risk considerations and transaction cost economics, leading to an IT service governance. This contributes to governance research regarding adaptive and efficient arrangements with reduced risks for business-located IT activities.