Applying IT governance principles of control, coordination, and communication in a shared services technology group

Abstract

IT governance focuses on how leadership can be effective and efficient in guiding an organization's use of technology to meet business needs. Over the past decade, IT governance has become a key issue of concern for senior technology leaders around the world. This research suggests that shared services technology groups can leverage appropriately architected IT governance practices given three primary roles played by IT governance to induce appropriate IT-related behaviors: control, coordination, and communication. Specifically, this thesis represents research completed at Raytheon Company's Space and Airborne Systems (SAS) division in partnership with MIT's Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program. The author worked closely with the Logistics Strategy and Optimization group, which focuses on optimizing business processes and maintaining performance metrics for SAS Logistics. The author led a team to formalize the technology introduction process to increase business unit visibility, knowledge sharing, and reuse by applying traditional IT governance and core process redesign principles. By analyzing Raytheon's technology introduction process through the lens of control, coordination and communication, this research was able to validate the relevance of the framework in a specific shared services environment. An improved technology introduction process is proposed and tested along with recommendations for organizational changes to improve alignment across different business sites. Some recommendations include expanding technology knowledge and oversight through new communication channels, expanding core team responsibilities, and standardizing product development documentation focused on appropriately setting customer expectations. This thesis also documents insights about business unit readiness to adopt shared technologies and provides recommendations for future work focusing on project portfolio management and stakeholder documentation.