Public and Private Sector IT Governance: Identifying Contextual Differences

This paper highlights systemic contextual differences and the unique IT Governance issues that might arise in public and private sector organizations. Public sector organizations constitute a significant component of economic activity in most countries. Like their private sector counterparts, many public sector agencies are struggling to cope with reduced or inadequate IT budgets and are continuously looking for ways to extract maximum value from IT resources. While both sectors face similar managerial-level IT issues and challenges, we argue that there are systemic differences between private and public sector organizations suggesting that a one size fits all approach to IT Governance may not apply

The Concept of Agility in IT Governance and its Impact on Firm Performance

With significant advancements in digital technologies, firms find themselves competing in an increasingly dynamic business environment. Therefore, the logic of business decisions is based on the agility to respond to emerging trends in a proactive way. By contrast, traditional IT governance (ITG) frameworks rely on hierarchy and standardized mechanisms to ensure better business/IT alignment. This conflict leads to a call for an ambidextrous governance, in which firms alternate between stability and agility in their ITG mechanisms. Accordingly, this research aims to explore how agility might be integrated in ITG. A quantitative research strategy is implemented to explore the impact of agility on the causal relationship among ITG, business/IT alignment, and firm performance. The results show that the integration of agile ITG mechanisms contributes significantly to the explanation of business/IT alignment. As such, firms need to develop a dual governance model powered by traditional and agile ITG mechanisms

Relationship Between Corporate Governance and Information Security Governance Effectiveness in United States Corporations

Cyber attackers targeting large corporations achieved a high perimeter penetration success rate during 2013, resulting in many corporations incurring financial losses. Corporate information technology leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to implement information security domain processes that effectually address the challenges for preventing and deterring information security breaches. Grounded in corporate governance theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between strategic alignment, resource management, risk management, value delivery, performance measurement implementations, and information security governance (ISG) effectiveness in United States-based corporations. Surveys were used to collect data from 95 strategic and tactical leaders of the 500 largest for-profit United States headquartered corporations. The results of the multiple linear regression indicated the model was able to significantly predict ISG effectiveness, F(5, 89) = 3.08, p = 0.01, R² = 0.15. Strategic alignment was the only statistically significant (t = 2.401, p \u3c= 0.018) predictor. The implications for positive social change include the potential to constructively understand the correlates of ISG effectiveness, thus increasing the propensity for consumer trust and reducing consumers' costs

Business-IT Alignment in the Era of Digital Transformation: Quo Vadis?

For the last four decades, the alignment of business and IT strategies also referred to as business-IT alignment (BITA), has been recognised as one of the top concerns for leaders. The current digital transformation journey undertaken by most organisations, however, triggered a new approach to planning and executing business and IT strategies as well as pursuing BITA. A systematic literature review is conducted to capture the paradigmatic shift in research and practice. A total of 94 articles published between 2014 and 2018 were identified searching through databases known to index reputable IS journals and conference proceedings. The analysis of the review revealed the continued conceptual debate on BITA construct as well as new research topics. The significance of digital strategy, enterprise architecture models, as well as intelligent IT systems to enable elicitation, implementation and assessment of activities enabling BITA are garnering the attention of researchers. Potential research directions are presented

Baseline mechanisms for IT governance at universities

The pervasive use of technology has created a critical dependency on Information Technology (IT) that requires IT Governance (ITG). ITG calls for the definition and implementation of formal mechanisms at the highest level in the organization taking into account structures, processes and relational mechanisms for the creation of business value from IT investments. However, determining the right ITG mechanisms remains a complex endeavour. Previous studies have identified ITG mechanisms in use in the financial and health care industries. While universities also increasingly depend on IT for their success, ITG implementation in universities has not received much attention. As universities have many unique characteristics, it is highly unlikely that ITG experiences from the financial and health care industries can be directly applied to universities. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to identify an ITG mechanisms’ baseline for universities. Six case studies comprising of in-depth interviews three international universities in Brazil, Portugal and the Netherlands, led to the proposal of a minimum ITG baseline for universities that is compared with the financial and health care industries. This article concludes by presenting key contributions, limitations and future work.CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil Process n.º10415/13-0This work was supported by CAPES Foundation, Ministry of Education of Brazil Process n.º10415/13-0 and by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology, project UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Proliferation and fragmentation: Transactions costs and the value of aid

The problem of the proliferation of the number of aid donors and aid channels continues to worsen. It is widely and plausibly believed that this significantly; reduces the value of aid by increasing direct and indirect transactions costs. We contribute to the existing literature by: (a) categorising the apparent adverse effects of proliferation; (b) producing a reliable and fair indicator of the relative degree to which the main bilateral donors proliferate or concentrate their aid; (c) giving some explanation of why some donors proliferate more than others; (d) constructing a reliable measure of the extent to to which recipients suffer from the problem of fragmentation in the sources of their aid; and (e) demonstrating that the worst proliferators among the aid donors are especially likely); to be suppliers of aid to recipients suffering most from fragmentation. There are significant implications for aid policy