Framing the Frameworks: A Review of IT Governance Research

Abstract

With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the United States in 2002, and an ever-increasing corporate focus on ensuring prudent returns on technology investments, the notion of IT governance became a major issue for both business practitioners and academics. Although the term "IT governance" is a relatively new addition to the syntax of academic research, significant previous work is reported on IT decisions rights and IT loci of control, notions that are synonymous with the current understanding of IT governance. This paper presents a literature review for existing research in IT governance. A framework, named the Conceptual Framework For IT Governance Research is proposed to provide a logical structure for existing research results. Using this framework, we classify the previous literature on governance into two separate streams that follow parallel paths of advancement. A popular contemporary notion of IT governance is then presented, together with the argument that this new notion, by implicitly extending both streams of research, represents an initial amalgamation of the two paths of literature. We conclude that even with the consideration of contemporary structures, academicians and practitioners alike continue to explore the concept of IT governance in an attempt to find appropriate mechanisms to govern corporate IT decisions.

An Empirical Assessment of IT Governance Transparency: Evidence from Commercial Banking

“…A closer examination of this literature reveals that IT governance research has mainly concentrated on IT management and IT decision making (i.e., centralized, decentralized, and hybrid IT decision structures). Brown and Grant (2005) specify that such IT decision structures are one form of IT governance. Focusing only on this particular IT governance form, contemporary IT governance literature has explored many different facets of IT governance, such as the role of the board of directors, the effectiveness of the IT steering committee, IT control and firm performance, IT investment performance, and IT audit issues (Boritz & Lim, 2008;Gu, Xue, & Ray, 2008;Huff, Maher, & Munro, 2006;Mähring, 2006;Merhout & Havelka, 2008;Prasad, Heales, & Green, 2009;Trites, 2004).…”

Decision execution mechanisms of IT governance: The CRM case

“…IT governance has been catching more attention of researchers recently, in view of firms' heavy investments in business IT innovations such as ERP, CRM, and SCM systems (Brown & Grant, 2005;Weill & Ross, 2005). As defined by Weill (2004), IT governance refers to "the framework for decision rights and accountabilities to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT" (p. 3).…”

Managing Structure-Related Software Project Risk: A New Role for Project Governance

“…Apart from some early interest in the structuring of IT in organizations (for example, whether it should be centralized, decentralized or positioned in a hybrid/federated form) [10], the focus of IT governance research has been mainly on strategic and operational alignment rather than structural alignment. More recently, IT governance standards have started to emerge; in particular, ISO/IEC 38500:2008, based on AS 8015-2005, and a derivative draft Australian Standard on the corporate governance of projects involving IT investments (08145).…”