Information Governance

in the Big Data Era:

Aligning Organizational
Capabilities

Authors: Mikalef, Patrick, Krogstie, John,Van de Wetering,

Rogier, Pappas, Ilias, Giannakos, Michail

Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii International Conference

on System Sciences

Date Issued: 03 Jan 2018

 Presentation Outline
 Overview
 Summary of Article
 Critical Analysis of Article
- Validity/Contribution
- My Insights from Practice
- Identify one or more relevant IT Gov concepts or
principles from the lectures
Final Feedback
Overview
• Big data is growing rapidly in importance.
• Firms want to gain a Competitive Edge.
• Can Information Governance facilitate this
competitive Edge?
• If so, How?
Overview
• Survey data from 158 chief information officers and IT
managers working in Norwegian firms.
• Results show that information governance harness
the power of data to extract information which
ultimately will lead to better decision making.
• Information Governance also helps strengthen a
firms’ dynamic and operational capabilities .
• Which in turn lead to competitive performance gains.
 Summary of Article

IT Governance VS Information Governance

- IT Governance: defined as including the patterns of authority for key IT activities in business firms, including IT
infrastructure, IT use, and project management .

- Information Governance: information governance encompasses activities relating to decision-maker roles

(structural practices), decision tasks (procedural practices), and person responsibilities and development
(relational practices).

- Key Point: While the vast majority of companies have established IT governance schemes to align their IT
strategy with their business strategy, a very small percsssentage have made any significant efforts in
establishing an information governance practice, despite the hype of big data analytics and its potential
business value.
 Summary of Article cont’d

Difference between IT Governance VS

Information Governance
- The main distinction between the two is that the
former is a broader notion encompassing all activities
relating to IT management, while the latter is
centered on the data a firm owns, generates, or is
leveraging.
 Summary of Article

Information Governance
- The focus of information governance as such is to harness the power of the
continually growing data to extract information which ultimately will lead to better
decision making.
- With the advent of big data, the role of governance over the data artifact is becoming
increasingly more relevant yet the issue of information governance is lagging in terms
of firm’s adoption
- Also, few Studies to date have still to embark on the issue of examining the effects
that adopting information governance mechanisms have on performance.
 Summary of Article

Organizational Capabilities
-The competitive benefits that a firm currently has managed to obtain are a result of strengths built in reaction
to environmental responsiveness strategies. These strengths can be explained in terms of organizational
capabilities.
- Organizational capabilities: Defined as the processes that facilitate the most efficient, effective and
competitive use of a firms’ assets whether tangible or intangible.
- In other words, the potential of a business to achieve certain objectives by means of focused deployment,
and represent the building blocks on which firms compete in the market
- Organizational capabilities emerge through the strategic application and complex interactions of resources
that a firms owns or is capable of controlling, and the most effective means of orchestrating and deploying
them
 Summary of Article
The impact of Information Governance on Competitive Performance in the Big Data Era

- Information governance has effects that are often reflected in the industry in which the firm operates.
- Eg in the health care industry the provisioning of information led to reduced medical errors and an overall increase in efficiency.
In the airline industry, information governance was linked to enhanced decision making in scheduling, market analysis, and
ticket pricing.
- Information governance delivers data-driven innovations. By coalescing data from different sources, insight can be generated
that was previously unobtainable.
- Such effects of information governance can be detected in the healthcare sector where personalized medicine is being
developed based on big data analytics of systems biology (e.g. genomics) with electronic health record data
- These types of initiatives require a strong information governance scheme that is able to establish the processes and practices
for exploiting available data to the best possible extent.
 Summary of Article

The impact of Information Governance on Competitive

Performance in the Big Data Era

- Information governance can be posited to be an influencer of both a firms’ dynamic and operational
capabilities.
- By delivering improvements in both existing modes of operations and setting the necessary conditions that
facilitate the adaptive capability of a firm, information governance is posited as being an indirect
antecedent of performance.
- Therefore, Information governance has a positive effect on a firm’s:
• Dynamic capabilities
• Operational capabilities
 Summary of Article

The impact of Information Governance on Competitive

Performance in the Big Data Era
- Dynamic capabilities : defined as “a firm's ability to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external
competences to address rapidly changing environments the firm's specific and distinctive processes relating to
the transformation of resource reconfiguration to cope with environmental change.

- Eg dynamic capabilities can positively affect competitive performance by enabling a firm to identify and
respond to opportunities, by developing new processes, products, and services.

- Dynamic capabilities can improve the speed, effectiveness, and efficiency with which a firm operates and
responds to changes in its environment developing as such, an organizational agility
 Summary of Article

The impact of Information Governance on Competitive

Performance in the Big Data Era
- Operational capabilities:  are firm-specific sets of skills, processes, and routines, developed within
the operations management system, that are regularly used in solving its problems through configuring
its operational resources.
- Eg’s operational capabilities are necessary for attaining and sustaining a competitive advantage. Enable firms to
better understand their customers’ current and future needs and to be more capable of promptly serving these needs
- Positively affect competitive performance by creating customer satisfaction and loyalty and superior market
performance
- Create competitive value by allowing a firm to transform input into output in an efficient and effective way while
being able to avoid excessive costs, time, organizational disruptions or performance losses
 Critical Analysis of Article
Upon critically analyzing the article a number of limitations were identified with the study:

• The study utilized self- reported data to test research hypotheses and even though considerable
efforts were undertaken to confirm data quality, the potential of biases cannot be excluded.
• The data used in this study were based on respondents’ perceptions, and since the study based
collection on a single key informant, there is a possibility of bias.
• This  in my interpretation effectively means that factual data do not coincide with respondents’
perceptions. Even though this study relied on top management respondents as key informants, the
research team should have sampled multiple respondents within a single firm to check for inter-rater
validity and to improve internal validity.
• Inter-rater: The extent to which two or more raters (or observers, coders, examiners) agree. It
addresses the issue of consistency of the implementation of a rating system.
 Critical Analysis of Article

• The study was conducted in a sample of Norwegian firms but the question one now has to ask is can the
results be replicated in other countries that have different conditions of conducting business in order to
confirm the significance and value of developing information governance.
• On the other hand, to be fair, it is seen that many countries worldwide are in similar economic
environments as Norway, therefore providing generalizability to the results beyond a single country.
• Another limitation identified in the study is that although it examines the importance of information
governance on influencing firm organizational capabilities and, effectively, competitive performance, it
does not perform a sensitivity analysis on the contextual factors.
• As a result it is seen that information governance and the affected capabilities would vary in significance
depending on the dynamism of the environment.
• The study failed to factor in the influence of the internal environment. It is highly likely that the value of
governing Big Data initiatives may be more or less beneficial in different conditions.
Identify one or more relevant IT Gov concepts or principles from the
lectures

Moores law says I.T delivers more and more

for less and less. So, if I invest in I.T I will be
getting more and more for less and less.

However, the study goes against Moore’s law

as it suggests that without the necessary
structural, procedural, and relational
practices of information governance, it is
most probable that investments will not pay
off.

Paradox- Should focus on IT & Info

Governance to see return on investment
 Final Feedback
• While Information Governance in the Big Data Era may be necessary, is it a  sufficient
condition to lead to competitive performance gains?

• That question still remains in my opinion subject to several internal and external
factors, which hopefully will be addressed in subsequent research studies.  

• The study failed to factor in the influence of the internal environment. It is highly likely
that the value of governing Big Data initiatives may be more or less beneficial in
different conditions.
 References

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apTwMJwlT1k&feature=youtu.be

- IBM Redbooks. (2016, September 30). Retrieved January 30, 2021, from http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

- Mikalef, P., Boura, M., Lekakos, G., & Krogstie, J. (2020, August 16). The role of information governance in
big data analytics driven innovation. Retrieved January 30, 2021, from
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378720620302998

- Mikalef, P., Krogstie, J., Van de Wetering, R., Pappas, I., & Giannakos, M. (2018, January 03). Information
Governance in the Big Data Era: Aligning Organizational Capabilities. Retrieved January 30, 2021, from
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/50504?mode=full
 END

OF

PRESENTATION