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Title

The effect of IT Governance Maturity on IT Governance Performance

Author

Publication

Year

Read

(Simonsson, et al., 2010)

Information Systems Management

2010

09-Sep-2012

Key words

Alignment, business value, governance, strategic planning, ITIL,  COBIT

Summarizing comments

This article by Simonsson, Johnson and Ekstedt (2010) aims to provide evidence for the correlation between IT Governance Maturity and IT Governance Performance. The article defines IT Governance as the structures, processes and relational mechanism for the IT decision making in an organization. It is considered a complex array of interfirm relationships involved in achieving strategic alignment between business and IT.

The article defines IT governance maturity as the internal IT organization efficiency. IT governance performance  is considered to be the external effectiveness of services that the IT organization delivers to the business.

The authors recognize that ITIL has its focus on value adding indicating an alignment for business and IT. They do not see that ITIL is supporting governance as much as COBIT or as Val IT do. The authors use the COBIT process structure to research this correlation in the four governance domain (according to COBIT): PO. Plan and Organize (10 processes); AI. Acquire and Implement (7 processes); DS. Deliver and Support (13 processes); ME. Monitor and Evaluate (4 processes). The assessment of the correlations is based upon 35 organizations, with 158 interviewees providing face-to-face input and additional survey. The results were further interpreted by 15 experts in the field, as it was considered that IT persons could better better evaluate the research results. I do question this aspect of the research, as the ever-so-common mismatch between Technology and Business objectives is founded in the fact that they develop on two separate parallel lines. To evaluate IT governance performance representatives from both lines should contribute.

Nevertheless, the research provided evidence for the correlation between IT governance maturity and IT governance performance. The correlations were strongest in the Planning and organizing processes (as expected) and Monitor and evaluate. The Delivery and Support seems to have the weakest correlation. The expert  was surprised by the fact that the Project management process had such a weak correlation. I was also surprised to see this weaker correlation for Problem management and service level agreement management, and the performance and capacity management processes.

My personal stance on the strengths of the correlations between IT governance maturity and performance is that the closer the processes are to the daily operations, the less it is specifically linked to higher level objectives. Project management is so much aimed at achieving something pre-defined; there is not too much thought going into the higher purpose of the project objectives. It is very much aimed at the day-to-day. Whereas other PO processes are much more targeting the alignment with business. Problem management is rather often reactive, which is considered a valid justification for the weaker correlation for this process.

The IT performance and capacity management process is not discussed in the article. I would think that this process indeed is very much aimed at the internal IT efficiency and not so much considering the external interfaces. The weak correlation for Service level agreement management I find hard to explain. Maybe because the study was performed in Sweden and the culture is less prone to seek competitive advantages on this level of negotiations. No idea. For a weak correlation in compliance management an similar argument was presented.

I like the list in Table 9 sorting the COBIT processes in order of the correlation strength between the process's IT governance maturity and performance. This list could be useful to focus our improvement efforts.  I do not like the description of the study which I think is not sufficiently comprehensive to understand how the maturity level and performance level is measured. The article could have at least have provided the survey questions.

Interesting quotes

Definitions for IT governance, IT governance maturity and IT governance performance

Actions

Due date

Status

1. Read and summarize

09-Sep-12

Done