Context: Agility at the business level requires Information Technology (IT) environment flexible and customizable, as well as effective and responsive governance in order to deliver value faster, better, and cheaper to the business.
Objective: To understand better this context, our paper seeks to investigate how the domain of agile governance has evolved, as well as to derive implications for research and practice.
Method: We conducted a systematic review about the state of art of the agile governance up to and including 2013. Our search strategy identified 1992 studies in 10 databases, of which 167 had the potential to answer our research questions.
Results: We organized the studies into four major groups: software engineering, enterprise, manufacturing and multidisciplinary; classifying them into 16 emerging categories. As a result, the review provides a convergent definition for agile governance, six metaprinciples, and a map of findings organized by topic and classified by relevance and convergence.
Conclusion: The found evidence lead us to believe that agile governance is a relatively new, wide and multidisciplinary area focused on organizational performance and competitiveness that needs to be more intensively studied. Finally, we made improvements and additions to the methodological approach for systematic reviews and qualitative studies.