Managing Turnaround: Foundational Design Requirements for IT Management in Distressed Corporate Restructuring

Accepted for HICSS 2027

What happens to IT management when a company enters a period of severe financial and operational distress?

This research examines why established IT governance approaches can reach their limits in corporate turnaround situations, where time, liquidity and organizational stability are severely constrained.

Based on a Multivocal Literature Review, the paper develops foundational design requirements for managing IT in distressed corporate environments and identifies six systemic friction points in traditional management models. It also introduces the concept of Surgical De-construction Capabilities (SDC) — the organizational capability to rapidly decouple, downscale and remove IT assets when survival requires decisive action.

Authors
Dilâra Schumann-Hammon
Alexander Rossmann
Dieter Hertweck
David Weissenberger