Advantages And Disadvantages Of IT Governance

A governance board is the governing body of an organization which makes crucial and strategic decisions on serious issues relating to the organization with the intention to have a lasting impact on the organization (Weill, 2004). On the other hand, a good and effective IT governance is one that manage IT resources and use IT to attain enterprise wide performance goals (Weill, 2004). A salient issue about good governance is that, it enhances the IT decision making processes in an enterprise by making sure that the CIO is the one who is responsible for making majority of the important IT decisions and also make sure that those decisions serve their purpose as enablers in achieving the desired corporate behaviours and objectives (Weill, 2004).

An effective IT governance should be infrequently redesigned and only when a major transformation such as merger or major change in the organization strategy arises which has an effect on the enterprise desirable behaviours then can it be redesigned. This is so because, governance processes are used to communicate and enforce new acceptable behaviours in the organization to facilitate organizational changes and therefore, redesigning a whole IT governance is a huge investment project, so it should be done incrementally. If an IT governance is redesigned as a result of changes due to adjustments in the organization’s strategy or in the market-place, this is an indication that there might be a problem with the governance arrangements. In a situation like this, adjustments are supposed to take place only within the area that the specific decisions were made with respect to the current governance arrangements. For instance, a change in the IT governance arrangements in an organisation due to unfavourable economic condition, indicates that initially the governance structure was not efficiently designed and the enterprise needs to be

The CEO wanted to enhance the business units in the enterprise synergies by providing an upgrade to their important customers that are doing business with more than one of their business units. To attain this goal, the CEO must think about aligning the business with the IT strategies, this means that the CEO should have a healthy communication relationship with the CIO so that they can easily work together in designing the IT governance arrangements that is capable of aligning the enterprise IT infrastructures to support in achieving this new objective. This shift in IT governance structures will enhance the sharing of customers’ information, pricing, logging details, and order the enterprise-wide designs. However, since there will be no enough incentives for the executives, that is, their incentives does not align with the objectives set, the IT governance designed will not yield sufficient results. Hence, it is only when the business department executives ' incentive and reward systems would be redesigned from approximately 100 percent depending upon the business unit performance to 50 percent depending on the enterprise-wide performance that the new IT governance will be adopted in the