icegov2012 proceedings

A Literature Review: IT Governance Guidelines and Areas
Ruben Pereira
Instituto Superior Tecnico
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa
+351 966474901
rubenfspereira@ist.utl.pt
ABSTRACT
Lack of business/IT (BIT) alignment affects e-governance
initiatives success. Information Technology Governance (ITG)
has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue for more than five
years and has risen in priority between 2007 and 2009. Several
Frameworks exist to help organizations in ITG implementation
but lack scientific viewpoint, are complex, and also overlap each
other. In this paper we make a literature review to leverage the
ITG general guidelines and main ITG areas in order to provide a
scientific viewpoint validation. We also evaluate our artefacts
with expert’s interviews in order to provide practitioner viewpoint
validation, and map our artifact with current theories. Finally, we
conclude our research with main contributions and future work.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.0 [Models and Principles]: General.
General Terms
Management, Performance, Design, Standardization, Theory.
Keywords
IT, Governance, Management, IT Governance Guidelines,
Literature Review, IT Governance Areas, e-Governance
1. INTRODUCTION
Many organizations have become totally reliant on IT for success
and recognize that IT is becoming one of their main
organizational assets [34][16]. However, government bodies have
limited expertise in IT and are slow to leverage their potential for
improving governance what can be fatal for organizations wishing
to implement e-Governance solutions [31][23]. BIT alignment
becomes crucial and ITG has been identified as an appropriate
solution to deal with increasing IT changes and complexity. The
purpose of this paper is to examine both the previous and the
current research in ITG so a basis for further research and the
identification of the main ITG guidelines and main ITG and
Management (ITG/M) areas based on literature and experts’
knowledge could be provided in order to help organization in
future ITG implementations. Indeed, there are studies that show
the positive effect of good ITG implementation in organizations
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for
components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored.
Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to
post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
and/or a fee.
ICEGOV '12, October 22 - 25 2012, Albany, NY, USA
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1200-4/12/10...$15.00
320
Miguel Mira da Silva
Instituto Superior Tecnico
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa
+351 919671425
mms@ist.utl.pt
[50][27], nevertheless, there are also evidences that IT keep being
badly managed and governed [29][14]. Such fact influences the
success of e-Governance initiatives.
Several Frameworks exist to help organizations in ITG
implementation. However, organizations still prefer to design
their own [5]. Such fact is not surprising since most Frameworks
state that there is no single “best” IT organizational structure or
governance arrangement because IT needs to respond to the
unique environments within which exists [29][2] but don’t specify
the factors that can influence each ITG implementation, are seen
as complex [35], too general [32], lacking a theoretical foundation
from a scientific viewpoint [17], and overlap each other [35].
Such statements reinforce the possibility of improvements in the
existing Frameworks.
2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Few researchers attempted to perform empirical studies on ITG
topic [6]. Hence, we constructed and evaluated new and
innovative artifacts following the design research paradigm [21].
Based on the four design artifacts produced by design science
research in information systems - constructs, models, methods and
instantiations - we will focus on constructs (ITG guidelines and
ITG/M areas). Constructs are necessary to describe certain aspects
of a problem domain [37], they provide the language in which
problems and solutions are defined and communicated.
The methodology applied is divided according to the two
processes of design science research (build and evaluate). The
literature review approach used in this paper follows the conceptcentric
methodology of IS literature reviews as outlined in
Webster and Watson [49]. In this article we evaluated our artifacts
through interviews. In addition, by submitting scientific
publications to respected international conferences, we also used
the appraisal of the scientific community as evaluation criteria.
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
Since the 1990s ITG has been a concern. However, good ITG is
no longer a “nice to have”, but a “must have” and can contribute
to higher returns on assets at a time when business is spending
increasing amounts on technology investment [48]. Indeed,
Gartner states that ITG has been recognized as a CIO top-10 issue
for more than five years and has risen in priority during the past
two [16]. ITG potential is also in the fact that the most significant
IT issues, currently and in the future, are not technology-related,
but governance-related [18].
3.1 IT Governance Guidelines
Guidelines have been designed, used, and adopted in several
domains [21][4][43]. As a result, they should be considered an
instrument that ought not to be underestimated since guidelines