The Governance of Services-based Integration of Urbanized Information Systems

The role of information systems is ever more critical in supporting complex organizational processes. In other words, modern organizations survival depends on the efficiency of the support brought by IT to organizational processes. They need sophisticated methods, approaches, and tools to solve the new challenges created by environmental constraints. Agile Information systems are among the instruments proposed by academics and practitioners to help organizations in managing continuous change and overcoming problems induced by external pressures. Many solutions have been proposed by academics and practitioners in order to help organizations build agile information systems. Despite their richness, the proposed frameworks don’t consider the critical role played by information systems governance in the development and use of agile information systems. The “information city” framework describes how to build and govern agile information systems. The application of the “information city” framework is called information systems urbanization. Nevertheless, the integration of urbanized information systems is among the major problems to solve in order to maximize and sustain the benefits of information systems urbanization. In this paper, we analyze the contribution of services to urbanized information systems integration.