A Survey on the Use and Effects of Goal Hierarchies in Digitalization Efforts

Digitalization has become a primary goal for organizations. Successfully adopting the digital context both in daily operations and in business management and strategy entails great benefits at different levels (organizational, economic, social, environmental…). Thus, it is very important that practitioners have clear conceptions of the goals in this regard and that those goals are “alive” in organizations.For this reason, in this study we present a survey that we performed among practitioners related to the management of Information Technology (IT) from both the private and public sectors in Norway. Through this survey we have tried to find out how organizations understand and translate the current context of digitalization from different goal levels. For that, we asked respondents to relate to one of three goal hierarchies: A) a classical governance approach; B) an organizational tier approach; and C) an effects-based approach.Among the results obtained we found that the first two are the most used and the goal achievement is slightly higher for the classical governance approach than for the organizational tier approach. Likewise, we identified that while top level management has a good understanding of the goals, this understanding deteriorates as one moves down the organizational hierarchy.