Paradoxical Governance: A study of how CIOs combine innovation and efficiency through IT governance

Abstract

With an increasing use of IT in organizations, it has become more important for CIOs to govern the IT department to support the firm with efficiency and innovation. Drawing from Organizational Ambidexterity (OA) and IT governance, this study explore how CIOs blend and balance innovation and efficiency through IT governance. This is done with a qualitative approach interviewing renowned CIOs from large organizations in Sweden. Our findings indicate that employing blend strategies are more effective from a long term perspective while also being applicable in most scenarios. Furthermore, the result indicates that cases of using both structural and contextual OA are a common and good way of achieving OA in organizations. The most prevalent contextual approach for OA is to educate employees. Education leads to raised motivation, improves thinking and most important: decision delegation becomes more feasible, making use of more competence while lowering the workload on executives. The findings of this study reveals, for the first time, how paradoxes can be resolved to achieve OA in an IT context. Limitations and future research are also discussed.