Profiling Organizational IT Assimilation for Information Governance

Abstract

At its root, information governance deals with mechanisms to ensure that the information resource yields appropriate returns to the organization. However, IT is deeply embedded in organizations. Given this embeddedness, a key input to information governance therefore, is a comprehensive profile of the current state of assimilation of IT within an organization. Based on detailed interviews of senior executives in three large organizations, this exploratory study presents a preliminary model to assess an organization’s state of IT assimilation. Given the multifaceted nature of IT assimilation, we inductively extract general concepts from the specifics of the case studies to identify the dimensions of this phenomenon and characterize different levels of each. A major conceptual challenge is that, while IT assimilation has several dimensions, a profiling model must be parsimonious and ordinal to be practically useful. Usage of the model for information governance is also discussed.

Keywords: IT assimilation, dimensions of assimilation, information governance