IT Governance: An Introduction

In this digital era, Information Technology (IT) has become a core element for businesses to make their operations more efficient, improve product quality, comply with statutory requirements, manage risk and security- in short, generate overall business value. As the dependence of organizations on IT had grown, the IT budgets have increased significantly. Thus, the management were required to optimize IT investment and extract maximum value out of every dollar spent on IT resources. That was how emerged a need for having appropriate IT governance practices in organizations. IT governance basically provides a framework to identify responsibility center for the performance of IT in meeting the organizational goals, and justify the need for IT on more real terms, like Return On Investments (ROI), and Economic Value Added (EVA). It governs the need, progress and performance of IT initiatives across the organization and assesses the relevance of every IT initiative vis-à-vis the business objectives that it can fulfill. The idea of IT Governance is similar to that of corporate governance, where boards of directors and executives hold responsibility for the performance of the organization. The inevitability of applying IT for running a business successfully has made several business organizations adopt IT governance. This book provides a broad insight into IT Governance and its implication in organizational performance. The readers are introduced to various IT governance frameworks and approaches. Highlights on various implementation issues and industry practices are also provided.