Towards Managing IT Complexity: An IT Governance Framework to Measure Business-IT Responsibility Sharing and Structural IT Organization

For large enterprises, IT governance is a major lever to influence the way how IT enables business. The authors hypothesize that a part of IT governance, namely business-IT responsibility sharing and structural IT organization, has a strong influence on IT architecture complexity of large enterprises. IT complexity is challenging CIOs of large enterprises all over the world day-by-day. Yet, IT complexity so far has been analyzed by scientific research only to a small degree. To prove or falsify the hypothesis that IT governance influences IT architecture complexity, the authors developed concepts to measure both aspects with a framework. In this research, the concept for business-IT responsibility sharing and its scientific background are presented. The IT complexity measurement concept is shown, focusing on IT architecture complexity. An outlook for this research, an empirical study that is currently in progress is given.