Importance 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). According to Weill, IT governance can be defined as, ‘‘a framework which has been specifically designed with the right to make decision and be accountable for it outcomes to encourage desirable behaviour in an organization in IT usage’’ (Weill, 2004, p.2). Furthermore, IT governance should be considered as an integral component of any corporate governance because

Nonetheless, a good IT governance has to have the management ambidextrous ability to enable it to make decision and control at the same time (Weill, 2004). Another 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). This is because, good governance has to be transparent in deciding who can make what decisions and how can that person be accountable for their actions in relation to the enterprise objectives (Weill, 2004). In a good governance enterprise, IT managers are being empowered to make certain decisions without seeking approval from top management if only the governance framework of that enterprise stipulated

This is because the top-performing enterprises constantly create new opportunities, and some of these opportunities will not be supported by the existing board decisions on IT. By clearly stating their exception-handling process it facilitate those issues that were not supported by the board to be debated in the open and which directly enhances organization’s learning process also. For example, without an exception-handling process, UPS, a top-performing package-delivery and logistics enterprise would not have been successful today. The issue is that, this company has a clearly stated exception mechanism for its IT architecture and standards. To be effective in their governance, any exception to their IT architecture or standards has to be justified. To come up with this exception-handling statement the CEO in charge for the business and the CIO in charge for the architect each drafted a one-page statement justifying the need for the exception with one from the business point of view, another from the technical viewpoint. Adding to the strength of UPS design is that, IT organization has the allowance to effectively support new businesses that has same systems requirements but which does not neatly integrate within the UPS’s ‘‘highly standardized IT environment’’ (Galliers & Leidner, 2009, p.