The Agile Strategies in IT Governance: Towards a Framework of Agile IT Governance in the Banking Industry

Digital transformation has changed corporate reality and, with that, firms’ IT environments and IT governance (ITG). As such, the perspective of ITG has shifted from the design of a rela-tively stable, closed and controllable system of a self-sufficient enterprise to a relatively fluid, open, agile and transformational system of networked co-adaptive entities. Related to this par-adigm shift in ITG, this paper aims to clarify how the concept of an effective ITG framework has changed in terms of the demand for agility in organizations. Thus, this study conducted 33 qualitative interviews with executives and senior managers from the banking industry in Ger-many, Switzerland and Austria. Analysis of the interviews focused on the formation of catego-ries and the assignment of individual text parts (codings) to these categories to allow for a quantitative evaluation of the codings per category. Regarding traditional and agile ITG di-mensions, 22 traditional and 25 agile dimensions were identified. Moreover, agile strategies within the agile ITG construct and ten ITG patterns were identified from the interview data. The data show relevant perspectives on the implementation of traditional and new ITG dimensions and highlight ambidextrous aspects in ITG in the German-speaking banking industry.