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Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written
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International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 1(4), 63-67, October-December 2005 63
IT Governance:
How Top Performers Manage IT
Decision Rights for Superior Results
Reviewed by Lester P. Diamond, U.S. Government Accountability Office, USA
Successful electronic government
requires the successful implementation of
technology. This book lays out a frame-
work for understanding a system of deci-
sion processes that have been shown to
be associated with the successful use of
technology. Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross
are based at the Center for Information
Systems Research at MIT’s Sloan School
of Management, which has been doing
research on the management of informa-
tion technology since 1974. Understand-
ing how to make decisions about infor-
mation technology has been a primary fo-
cus of the Center for decades.
Weill and Ross’ book is based on
two primary studies and a number of re-
lated projects. The more recent study is a
survey of 256 organizations from the
Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific that
was led by Peter Weill between 2001 and
2003. This work also included 32 case
studies. The second study is a set of 40
case studies developed by Jeanne Ross
between 1999 and 2003 that focused on
the relationship between information tech-
nology (IT) architecture and business strat-
egy. This work identified governance is-
sues associated with IT and organizational
change efforts. Three other projects un-
dertaken by Weill, Ross, and others be-
tween 1998 and 2001 also contributed to
the material described in the book. Most
of this work is available through the CISR
Web site, http://mitsloan.mit.edu/cisr/r-
main.php. Taken together, these studies
represent a substantial body of work on
which to base the development of a frame-
BOOK REVIEW
IT Governance: How Top Performers
Manage IT Decision Rights for Supe-
rior Results
by Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross
Boston: Harvard Business School Press,
2004, 269 pages, $35.00
ISBN 1-59139-253-5
64 International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 1(4), 63-67, October-December 2005
Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written
permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.
work for understanding IT governance.
While most of their sample is drawn from
the private sector (the Metropolitan Po-
lice Service — Scotland Yard, Tennessee
Valley Authority, and UNICEF — were
the only public sector case studies in the
sample), the authors did commit Chapter
7 to describing how their work would
apply to these sectors.
The authors describe IT governance
as “specifying the decision rights and ac-
countability to encourage desirable behav-
ior in the use of IT” (p. 8). Their definition
includes establishing a set of processes and
delegation of authorities for providing in-
put and making decisions. Certainly, there
is nothing in this description of IT gover-
nance that would make it seem any less
appropriate for the public sector than for
the private sector. Clearly, some drivers
may change, but the fundamental defini-
tion works.
Weill and Ross lay out three ques-
tions that must be addressed by any ef-
fective approach to IT governance:
1. What decisions must be made to en-
sure effective management and use of
IT?
2. Who should make these decisions?
3. How will these decisions be made and
monitored? (p. 10)
To begin to answer these questions,
they provide a matrix that relates five types
of IT decisions and six archetypes of de-
cision-making structures and provides the
foundation for both the analysis of exist-
ing governance structures and the devel-
opment of more effective structures. The
matrix is used extensively throughout the
book. The types of IT decisions are the
following:
• IT principles: Clarifying the business role
of IT
• IT architecture: Defining integration and
standardization requirements
• IT infrastructure: Determining shared
and enabling services
• Business application needs: Specifying
the business need for purchased or in-
ternally developed IT applications
• IT investment and prioritization: Choos-
ing which initiatives to fund and how
much to spend (pp. 10-11)
These five types of decisions are re-
lated and tend to flow from IT principles to
IT investment and prioritization. For ex-
ample, decisions regarding the
organization’s notion of IT’s role (e.g., en-
abler of integrated services for the citizen)
will inform how the organization ap-
proaches its IT architecture (e.g., an inte-
grated data model), which then provides a
foundation for the IT infrastructure (e.g., a
single, organization-wide data warehouse
or citizen relationship management system).
This all provides the necessary strategic and
technical underpinnings for developing sys-
tems to meet business needs (e.g., a uni-
fied portal for all services). According to
the authors’ approach, taken together the
first four decision types provide the basis
for resolving the three essential questions
critical to IT investment in any organiza-
tion: how much to spend on IT overall, how
to spread it across initiatives, and how to
appropriately address the needs of the vari-
ous constituencies.
Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written
permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.
International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 1(4), 63-67, October-December 2005 65
Six decision archetypes describe
the participants in a given IT decision.
They are:
• Business Monarchy: A group of busi-
ness executives or individual executives
(CxOs). Includes committees of senior
business executives (may include CIO).
Excludes IT executives acting indepen-
dently.
• IT Monarchy: Individuals or groups of
IT executives
• Feudal: Business unit leaders, key pro-
cess owners, or their delegates
• Federal: C-level executives and busi-
ness groups (e.g., business units or pro-
cesses); may also include IT executives
as additional participants. Equivalent of
the central and state governments work-
ing together.
• IT Duopoly: IT executives and one
other group (e.g., CxO, business unit,
or process leaders)
• Anarchy: Each individual user (p. 59)
In their analysis, the authors use these
same archetypes to describe the parties
that provide input to decisions.
By building a matrix with decisions
types along the horizontal and archetypes
along the vertical, the authors use their
model to analyze their survey data. They
use this same matrix to describe the gov-
ernance processes at several of their case
study sites and provide a tool for practi-
tioners to both assess their organizations’
governance structures and compare them
to what the authors found in similar orga-
nizations. For example, the authors found
that the federal archetype was, by far, the
most common approach used to provide
input to decisions. Over 80% of the firms
surveyed were using a federal model for
the more business-oriented IT decisions
(principles, business application needs,
and investments). Even in the more tech-
nically oriented decisions (architecture and
infrastructure), about half of the firms used
the federal approach. The authors point
out that of the six archetypes, the federal
approach is the most broad-based, while
still maintaining a differentiation between
central and distributed authorities. The
empirical results for actual decision author-
ity are less consistent. Decisions about IT
principles tended somewhat to be made
in a duopoly archetype (36%), where IT
executives make the decision with either
the business executives or corporate ex-
ecutives but not both. The business mon-
archy, where IT principles are decided by
corporate executives alone, also was
common (27%). The more technologically
oriented decisions tended to be made in
an IT monarchy (architecture, 73%; in-
frastructure, 59%), where the IT organi-
zation made the decision with broad-
based input (as described previously).
Decision structures for business applica-
tion needs and investments tended to re-
semble each other with the federal and
duopoly archetypes being common for
both at about 30% each. For IT invest-
ments, the business monarchy archetype
also was common, again at about 30%.
By now, readers of this review must
be thinking that there must be other driv-
ers that influence the approach that orga-
nizations choose to make their IT deci-
sions. In fact, the authors’ research has
provided five general factors:
66 International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 1(4), 63-67, October-December 2005
Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written
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1. Strategic and performance goals
2. Organizational structure
3. Governance experience
4. Size and diversity
5. Industry and regional differences
A great deal of the balance of the
book addresses these factors through de-
tailed discussion and specific illustrative
case studies. Of particular interest to read-
ers of this review may be Chapter 7, which
specifically addresses government and
not-for-profit organizations. In this chap-
ter, the authors use the Metropolitan Po-
lice Service-Scotland Yard, the Tennes-
see Valley Authority, and UNICEF to il-
lustrate the use (and adaptation) of their
framework in the public sector. The diffi-
culty of measuring value in the public sec-
tor is addressed, and a value framework
is developed by Mark Moore and others
(in Creating Public Value: Strategic
Management in Government, Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1995); others are utilized to help make
inroads in this difficult area. Based on their
survey, the authors found that governance
performance in not-for-profit (including
public sector) organizations is about 10%
less than in for-profit enterprises (based
on a four-factor measure provided by the
CIO). They suggest that this difference
may result from the greater difficulty in
measuring performance and setting goals
in not-for-profits. The same survey re-
vealed that not-for-profits tended to be
more like than unlike for-profits in their
patterns of IT governance, but there were
five notable differences that not-for-prof-
its exhibited:
• More business monarchies in all deci-
sions except architecture
• Significantly fewer IT monarchies in all
decisions
• More federal arrangements in all deci-
sions except investments
• More federal arrangements for inputs
to all decisions
• More duopolies for IT architecture (pp.
201-202)
These differences are attributed to
broader representation in decision mak-
ing that has been adopted by not-for-profit
organizations in order to balance the chal-
lenges in developing performance mea-
sures and goals. Certainly, further thought
about these differences between private
and public sector organizations would be
interesting.
Weill and Ross offer five guidelines
for not-for-profit organizations in order to
improve their IT governance performance.
These five are the following:
• Use joint business and IT decision mak-
ing for principles in order to combine
senior management’s input on strategic
decisions with IT management’s insights
on technological and organizational ca-
pabilities.
• Consider IT infrastructure principles to
be strategic business decisions, since
these decisions underlie an organization’s
capability to provide the unified services
that have become so critical to govern-
mental organizations.
• Don’t use a feudal model for business
application needs, even though there
may be pressure to focus on local con-
stituencies.
Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written
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International Journal of Electronic Government Research, 1(4), 63-67, October-December 2005 67
• Use joint decision making for IT invest-
ments in order to capture the same com-
bination of strengths described previ-
ously for principles (pp. 203-205).
In summary, the concepts and frame-
works developed in IT Governance:
How Top Performers Manage IT Deci-
sion Right for Superior Results provide
both an analytic model and a normative
framework that managers and academics
can use to better understand IT gover-
nance. The book is well written, and the
concepts are clearly presented. There is
sufficient detail that public managers can
use the matrix and find analogies to their
own organization in the case studies. The
discussion of the challenges of measuring
value in the public sector is not nearly well
enough developed to resolve all of the is-
sues involved in that area, but this is a chal-
lenge that public administrators have been
dealing with for many years. Any progress
made in addressing the value of public
services can be used productively with the
ideas presented in this book. Academics
working in public administration may find
use in the model on a couple fronts. First
of all, the framework provides a valuable
starting point for describing approaches
to public sector IT governance. While the
authors offered a few suggestions for ap-
plying the framework in the public sector,
the existing pubic administration literature
may offer other opportunities for better
understanding the application of the frame-
work outside the private sector. In addi-
tion, the framework may provide an ana-
lytic tool for comparing organizations to
each other. In any case, this is an interest-
ing and valuable book that also may stimu-
late new thinking about similarities and dif-
ferences between private and public sec-
tor management approaches. It should find
good use by public administration practi-
tioners and academics.
Lester P. Diamond (diamondl@gao.gov) is Assistant Director, Information
Technology Management Issues, at the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
