Research Statement

My research seeks to explore how IT Governance benefits business professional's use of IT in the organization beyond the IT function to better explain the mechanisms of strategic alignment and offer empirical evidence in support of IT Governance adoption. I have spent a decade consulting and helping organizations use IT to re-engineer processes. In that capacity, I observed some businesses are able to use IT more successfully than others. When I began consulting, my belief was that competency with IT would also predict the quality of business decisions regarding those IT systems. Counter-intuitively I discovered this is not true and understanding this paradox is one motivation for my research. 

Why are some managers able to make better decisions for their organization about IT than others? Are there common practices which can benefit organizations in their quest to generate value from IT systems? I believe some of the answers to these questions can be better understood by studying the relationship between management practices and IT processes in organizations. All organizations use IT processes, and the effort to integrate those processes with business goals is referred to in the literature as strategic alignment.

IT Governance has been shown to improve strategic alignment, but how this benefits the organization is not well understood. The value IT adds to an organization extends beyond the IT function and also depends on how business professionals use IT. Does the influence of IT Governance also extend benefits to the non-IT functions such as marketing, sales and management?  If so, this would better explain why alignment benefits an organization and would provide empirical evidence in support of IT Governance adoption. This proposal outlines my research agenda to understand how governance benefits business professional's use of IT in the organization. 

Recent Publications

• Byron Marshall, Michael Curry, Rene Reitsma. (2010), "IT Governance Norms and IT Success." 2nd annual Pre‐ICIS Workshop on Accounting Information Systems, December 2010, Saint Louis, MO, U.S.A.
  
• Byron Marshall, Michael Curry, Rene Reitsma. (2010) "Does COBIT Improve IT Solutions?", American Accounting Association Conference, IS Section. (Read PDF)