Exploring the governance of IT in SMEs in Småland

Abstract: With many research available on IT governance, this research differs from most of them due to its delimitation. The focus of this research lies in the two domains of value creation and performance measurement. Furthermore, the area of research has been small and medium Enterprises located in the area of Småland, Sweden. Brisebois, Boyd & Shadid (2001) gave us the following definition of IT governance: “How those persons entrusted with governance of an entity will consider IT in their supervision, monitoring, control, and direction of the entity. How IT is applied will have an immense impact on whether the entity will attain its vision, mission, or strategic goal.” An objective of IT governance is to align the IT resources of an enterprise in a way that it fast-tracks the business priorities of the enterprise and assures that the investments in IT generates business value and that the IT is performing to its expectations. The research questions and the outcome of this research paper sheds light on the challenges of both value creation and performance measurement within the SMEs, but it also showcases what the driving forces of IT value creation are and which benefits arise from measuring the IT performance within the SMEs. Through semi-structured interviews with four SMEs, based in the region of Småland, numerous amounts of challenges and driving forces for IT value creation and challenges and benefits to measuring IT performance have been extracted. Based on the extracted information from the interviews, an analysis and a conclusion have been formed by the authors. In the end, the authors provide their thoughts for suggestions for further work and how all of this contributes to the field of Informatics.