Formation of voluntary inter-organizational IT governance for healthcare and social welfare IT: theoretical background and empirical evaluation

Our study investigates the formation of voluntary inter-organizational IT governance for healthcare and social welfare IT. IT governance research has focused on governance within one organization. Therefore we first investigate the theoretical background of inter-organizational governance to understand better the formation of such arrangements. In addition to IT governance and health information governance literature we review resource based view, transaction cost economics and social network theory literature. We take constructs from literature and link them to the IT governance principles and to the benefits of IT cooperation. We then evaluate empirically the perceived significance of those principles and benefits with a case study and an expert survey. The empirical results confirmed that the reviewed literature establishes a solid theoretical basis to describe the formation of inter-organizational IT governance. In the expert survey, all IT governance principles and benefits proved to be important for the formation of the investigated IT governance arrangement. Furthermore, variations in evaluations were not related to demographic, situational or behavioral control variables. Our study supports the use of RBV, TCE and social network theory constructs as augments to prior IT governance constructs.