The benefits of IT governance

This research examines the factors that are important to the corporate governance of information technology. It focuses on those aspects of IT management that will be relevant to senior management and governing boards. The paper uses data from a survey of 817 Australian commercial and industrial organisations, and analyses the responses to questions about a number of key processes identified by the literature as important to IT governance. It derives a measurement of IT governance that underlies the strong correlations between the occurrences of the processes. The relationship between IT governance measure and the reported level of strategic benefits of strategic alignment is investigated, showing a strong association. Further, while much of the literature assumes organisations have IT departments, this study shows that this is a minority approach, but those organisations with IT departments do score higher both on IT governance and achievement of strategic alignment.