IT Governance in the Public Sector in a Developing Country

Abstract

This chapter focuses on IT governance in the public sector organizations in a developing country like Tanzania. Today in many organizations in the public sector, the use of IT has become crucial in sustaining and extending the organizations’ strategies and objectives. This pervasive use of technology has caused a critical dependency on IT that calls for a specific focus on IT governance. In this chapter, we provide its overview and, based on the analysis of five case studies indicate the current practices, problems, and consequences in the Tanzanian public sector environment. Moreover, we reveal twelve key issues to consider for effective IT governance together with the trends and future research in improving ICT-enabled transformational government in public service delivery in this environment. In this context, the chapter contributes to an understanding of the IT governance practices and related ICT-enabled transformational government issues and complexities involved in the transformational phase for better public service delivery in a developing country like Tanzania.

Applying IT governance balanced scorecard and importance-performance analysis for providing IT governance strategy in university

“…The organizations should appraise existing framework or best practices with their organizational processes before adoption (Krey et al, 2010). For IT governance adoption in developing nation (Tanzania), Nfuka et al (2009) highlighted that the problems with IT governance in public sector are lack of a specific IT strategic plan, lack of clear roles and responsibilities, inadequate follow-up and enforcement mechanisms, lack of IT governance awareness, inadequate budget, and lack of IT professional skills. In summary, the research in this category commonly reflects the issues of logical coherence for implementing IT governance into the organizational context.…”

IT service management education in Tanzania

“…Unfortunately, structured and well-organized practices for ITSM-such as those described in ITIL-are rarely achieved in organizations of developing countries, [1,11,18,21,36,38,42]. The reasons vary, but the most common challenges are related to the lack of a proper ICT policy and the low level of IT professionalism.…”

Information Technology Governance Barriers, Drivers, IT/Business Alignment, and Maturity in Ghanaian Universities

“…(2011) indicated that although both developing and developed countries share similar barriers to IT governance, there exist some distinctive factors such as lack of regulatory environment, lack of industry and vendor support, and national culture that hinder IT governance in developing nations. The industry sector plays a major role in the adoption of ITG practices and much effort has been spent investigating IT governance in organizations (De Haes & Van Grembergen, 2009;Nfuka et al, 2009;Othman et al, 2011). IT supports invariably all sectors of an economy including service, manufacturing, agriculture, and mining.…”