Who Should Control Your IT Systems? It Depends

A central blue circle with connected smaller nodes, surrounded by four clusters in green, yellow, and blue, symbolizing a network or data flow.
May 5 , 2026  |  By Mary Lacity

Share this via:

Who is this research for? This research is relevant for CIOs, IT leaders, digital strategy executives, and policymakers responsible for designing and governing modern technology ecosystems.

Executive Summary

This research from Mary Lacity at the Sam M. Walton College of Business (Information Systems) and her colleagues at Technical University of Munich and Copenhagen Business School examines how organizations structure control over modern technologies like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain. In practice, this comes down to questions business leaders face every day: Who owns the data? Who approves system changes? Where are decisions made—centrally by IT or distributed across business units?

The article shows that organizations tend to shift back and forth between centralized models (where control sits with a core team or provider) and decentralized models (where control is shared across teams, partners, or users) as technologies evolve. Centralization supports efficiency, scale, and consistency, while decentralization enables flexibility, resilience, and innovation. For IT leaders, effective governance is about deliberately placing control where it creates the most value— centralizing what must be standardized and distributing what benefits from local ownership or shared oversight.

Action Items for Industry

  • Audit hidden control points: Look beyond org charts to identify who actually controls data access, system updates, and platform rules.
  • Stress-test single points of failure: Identify where outages, vendor dependencies, or centralized decisions could disrupt the business—and build redundancy where needed.
  • Design governance, not just architecture: Pair technical decisions with clear rules for participation, accountability, and oversight to avoid unintended recentralization.
  • Plan for shifts, not static models: Treat governance as something that will evolve—build flexibility into contracts, platforms, and decision structures.

Quote from the Researcher

“This article frames the special issue we co-edited for the Journal of Information Technology that examines decentralized governance over software. Practitioners understand well the benefits and challenges of centralized governance, so we invited articles that empirically examine how decentralized governance is shaped in practice. The articles in the special issue show that purposeful decentralization is not simply engineered; it is learned through signaling, empowerment, and continuous adaptation.”

– Mary Lacity

Co-Authors & Affiliations

Ali Sunyaev — Technical University of Munich (TUM), TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology, TUM School of Management

Michel Avital — Copenhagen Business School, Department of Digitalization

Published in Journal of Information Technology, available to download here.

📩 Interested in learning more? If you’d like additional information about this research or to connect directly with the researchers, please email us at research@walton.uark.edu.

Mary LacityMary C. Lacity is Walton Professor of Information Systems and Director of the Blockchain Center of Excellence. She was previously Curators’ Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has heldvisiting positions at MIT, the London School of Economics, Washington University and Oxford University. She is a Certified Outsourcing Professional® and Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly Executive.