Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, organizations have increasingly relied on decentralized decision making by cross-functional teams to rapidly sense and respond to changes in their environment. MIT CISR research found that to empower these teams, organizations rely on four decision rights guardrails that align teams with enterprise-wide interests. The guardrails revolve around a company’s purpose, data, policies, and resource allocation processes. In this research project, we continue our 2021 investigation into how the decision guardrails enable and constrain decentralized decision making. We seek to answer the following research questions:
- What are successful practices and key mechanisms for each of the decision rights guardrails?
- What are the integration and standardization requirements for each guardrail? How should the decision rights for these practices and mechanisms be distributed among key organizational stakeholders (e.g., teams, units/lines of business, centers of excellence, leadership)?
- How do the four guardrails compare in terms of their contributions to key organizational performance indicators (e.g., organizational agility, time to market, cost of operations)?
Methods: Survey instrument
Seeking: Digital leaders, enterprise architects, IT governance officers, data experts, and/or product/solutions owners to participate in our survey
Contact: Nick van der Meulen
