Assessing Factors That Affect Successful Achievement of IT governance Goals

Abstract: In today’s dynamic and often unstable business environment, Information technology (IT) and how IT is controlled has become pervasive due to the high dependency of IT within organizations. The IT-investments are increasingly becoming more important within the overall budget for many organizations today and are distributed all over the organizations. This dependency requires the importance of aligning between IT units and how the strategy for business direction can be realized. Thus, the alignment between IT and business is the primary goal of IT. A clear and well-defined structure of what factors affect the organization to ensure control over IT is utterly important. Today, no straightforward structure of factors to ensure successful achievement of IT governance goals within organizations exists. This thesis aims to assess and analyze the importance of IT governance factors to successfully achieve IT governance goals. The survey data gathered from 40 IT governance experts are presented in this thesis. The results show that there exist differences on how factors affect, with factors concerning the boards’ responsibility being the most important and critical factors for successfully achieving IT governance goals. This thesis also identifies and discusses some of the factors that may be less important and hence seldom prioritized within organizations.