5. Towards Decentralized IT Governance in the Public Sector: A Capability-oriented Approach

Modern public organizations undergo an important transformation becoming a part of dynamic “innovative ecosystem” where they co-create value with citizens, government, policy makers and other institutions. Information Technology plays a central role in this transformation. Getting more value from IT becomes an intrinsic part of organizational mission. Information Technology Governance (ITG) is an important instrument that ensures that the organization will succeed in its mission. Efficient yet adaptive ITG is indispensable. To respond to the increasing service demand, public organizations require resources and capacities that lay outside the organization. Co-production, engagement of citizens and partner organizations, open innovation—are some of the major challenges. Meeting these challenges, public organizations need to master new governance styles to overcome the shortcomings of hierarchical structures and centralized decision making. In this work, we define a model where we adopt the theory of public value in order to reason about different contexts where ITG mechanisms are proposed as capabilities. We distinguish between three ITG styles: centralized, federated and decentralized and thereby provide a rationale allowing public organizations to identify an ITG style that fits best to their value-creation context and corresponding capability patterns as reusable ways for implementing governance of IT.