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Governing IT Activities in Business Workgroups—Design Principles for a Method to Control Identified Shadow IT

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Business Information Systems (BIS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 255))

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Abstract

The IT unit is not the only provider of information technology (IT) used in business processes. Aiming for increased work performance, many business workgroups autonomously implement IT resources not covered by their organizational IT service management. This is called shadow IT. Associated risks and inefficiencies challenge organizations. This study proposes design principles for a method to control identified shadow IT following action design research in four organizational settings. The procedure results in an allocation of task responsibilities between the business and the IT units following risk considerations and transaction cost economics. This contributes to governance research regarding business-located IT activities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We reviewed prior literature to build a basis for our research. We queried EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, AISeL, Jstor based on abstract, title, and keywords. Employing the four-eye principle, we removed duplicates and irrelevant papers. The search terms shadow IT, shadow systems, feral systems, gray IT, rogue IT, and hidden IT combined with IT, information services, information systems, and information security resulted in 29 papers.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. HTWG Konstanz - University of Applied Sciences, Konstanz, Germany

    Stephan Zimmermann & Christopher Rentrop

  2. Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg (Sachsen), Freiberg, Germany

    Carsten Felden

Authors
  1. Stephan Zimmermann
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  2. Christopher Rentrop
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  3. Carsten Felden
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stephan Zimmermann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, Poznan Univ of Economics and Business, Poznan, Poland

    Witold Abramowicz

  2. Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany

    Rainer Alt

  3. Information System Institute, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

    Bogdan Franczyk

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Zimmermann, S., Rentrop, C., Felden, C. (2016). Governing IT Activities in Business Workgroups—Design Principles for a Method to Control Identified Shadow IT. In: Abramowicz, W., Alt, R., Franczyk, B. (eds) Business Information Systems. BIS 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 255. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39426-8_20

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