IT Corporate Governance - Research Paper Example

The rational for the research paper is to investigate and analyze new trends in information systems application and their impact on information, effects on corporate design, structure and productivity. It is assumed that advances in technology, especially computer, information, and information technology, have presented organizations and managers with dramatic new challenges and opportunities, and researchers have been pressing to develop the theoretical and research grounding needed to understand and manage these developments.

It is supposed that information technology allows a corporation greater decentralization of functions thus ensuring effective management and control. Computers, the Internet, electronic mail, and other forms of information and information technology make possible more elaborate and interactive networking of people and organizational units, both within and between organizations (Dine, 2000). Some organizations have moved away from traditional hierarchical and departmental reporting relationships to forms of virtual organization and dynamic network organization, in which a central hub coordinates other units that formally belong to the same organization, as well as organizations formally outside the hub organization (such as contractors or agencies with overlapping responsibility for public agencies), via e-mail and the Internet.

Advances in IT reportedly lead to smaller organizations, decentralized organizations, better coordination internally and with external entities (Buck and Shahrim 2006). Organizations acquire and distribute internally information to carry out the critical functions of decision-making. These activities require the processing of information. There are two perspectives on organizational information-processing: the vertical and horizontal perspectives. Vertical information-processing involves the acquisition of information from the environment and the distribution of information from boundary spanning units toorganizational members at various hierarchical levels.

Horizontal information- processing involves the co-ordination of internal tasks by distributing information between organizational members within and between departments. Within the information-processing framework, information technology is one strategy in the organization's ability to process information (Danziger and Andersen 2002). An organizational design dimension, which relates the hierarchical level to the information-processing tasks at hand is the degree of centralization versus decentralization of decision-making.

Since decision-making requires the availability of unambiguous information, new information technology has the potential to shift the level of decision-making by providing access to information. This is one of the design dimensions to be investigated. Another vertical design dimension to be discussed is the hierarchy of authority. New information technology, by formalizing information-processing within organizations, is the resource that enables managers to report information. By enlarging the information options, new technology has the