IT Strategy and Governance Literature Review Help

Topic: Critical success factors for the IT strategy and governance

1. Introduction

The Information Technology (IT) resources, demands and investments are a major concern for the executive and board management due to the opportunities, issues and challenges in its effective governance and management in the enterprises in the global world today. Therefore, there is a need to address the critical success factors for the IT strategy and governance being a contemporary concern for the enterprises due to the rapid dependence of organizations on the IT for managing and growing the business in a competitive world. Thus, IT has become an integral part of the organizations in today’s world and its critical success factors are even more important that decide the success or failure of the IT systems being implemented in the organizations. In various activities, IT governance has now become an imperative need for corporate organizations. The key process is characterized by modernization, and its form of thinking and the ability to address the problems posed by the market world define intellectual leadership. Effective ITG produces real business advantages such as improved reputation, trust, time-to-market, product leadership and lower costs, all of that increase the value of stakeholders.

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Many legislations covering the protection of protected information, financial transparency, data management and disaster recovery among many others are subject to organizations today.   Shareholders, stakeholders and consumers also push them. Many organizations implement a formal IT governance programmed, which provides a framework of best practices and controls, to ensure it meets internal and external specifications. Both private and public sector organizations need to have a plan to maintain that business targets and objectives are achieved by their IT works.  Any company in any sector that must comply with legislation related to financial and technical transparency must be on the radar with a structured IT governance programme.  However, it consumes a lot of effort to incorporate a robust IT governance programme. Where really small entities can only practice essential methods of IT governance, a complete IT governance programme should be the objective of larger and more regulated organizations.  Therefore, IT strategy and governance have significant benefits including the production of measurable results for the achievement of goals and strategies via the following formal framework. It can be stated that the integral part of the enterprise governance overall is the IT governance. It also helps in the compatibility of the strategic organizational goals and the intentions for the aid of corporation for realizing a stage of satisfactory risk.

2. Main body

This part of the literature review essay constitutes the annotated bibliography of five identified sources for analyzing the literature regarding the selected topic that is “Critical success factors for the IT strategy and governance” under the area of IT strategy and governance/management.

Title: Critical success factors (CSFs) for information technology governance (ITG)

Reference: Alreemy, Z., Chang, V., Walters, R., & Wills, G. (2016). Critical success factors (CSFs) for information technology governance (ITG). International Journal of Information Management, 36(6), 907-916.

Annotation: The authors defined critical success factors as the key areas that need to go right in order to flourish a business. If the critical success factors are not performed and tackled well then it is very unlikely that goals, missions and objectives of any project or business would be achieved. So, critical success factors are not the practical detailed steps for implementing a system instead they are the assistant and supporting factors for the assistance of effective system’s implementation. The authors have also used the term of challenges or enablers for these critical success factors and categorized them as stakeholders involvement, management support, financial support, organisational effects (internal), strategic alignment between business and IT, staffing management of IT, IT structure, environmental effect (external), implementation management, and preparation.

Title: The Effect of Critical Factors on the Level of IT Governance in Enterprises in Slovakia.

Reference: Romanová, A., Bolek, V., & Zelina, M. (2018). The Effect of Critical Factors on the Level of IT Governance in Enterprises in Slovakia.

Annotation: The authors stated that the previous literature that is available focuses majorly on the structures, processes and forms of the IT governance and there has been less focus on the inhibitors or the factors that are actually critical for the development and implementation of the IT governance system. The characteristics of IT investments are considered highly important by the authors of this research since the investments in IT are processed at various levels with having differing functional scope and different requirements for boundary spanning. Therefore, they will be needing various actors of organization for governing the processes regarding decisions of IT investments. Hence, the inhibitors of IT governance identified by the authors are lack of interest and motivation in increasing the performance of the organization, lack of effective methodology regarding IT management and governance, absence of clear individual unit responsibility, bas cooperation of user units and IT units, reluctance of the units of IT/IS, poor quality of SLAs and contracts at commercial levels, absence of the IT/IS metrics systems, services of IT/IS suppliers having low quality and working capacity of the IT unit being insufficient. Moreover, the users preparation qualification being insufficient, application services that are provided being of low quality, low quality of the operated applications, lack of the interest of managers in the IT/IS application innovation and applications developed unsystematically with the relation to the performance of enterprise are some other inhibitors identified by the authors that need to be tackled in order to have a successful implementation of the IT strategy and governance.

Title: IT Governance—An Integrated Framework and Roadmap: How to Plan, Deploy and Sustain for Competitive Advantage

Reference: Selig, G. J. (2018, August). IT Governance—An Integrated Framework and Roadmap: How to Plan, Deploy and Sustain for Competitive Advantage. In 2018 Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET) (pp. 1-15). IEEE.

Annotation: Selig supported the stance that IT governance is the integrated framework for achieving the sustainable competitive advantage. One of the easiest ways for starting with any IT governance framework is to use the one that is already designed by the experts in the industry and being used by most of the organizations. Selig also provided the frameworks that are commonly used by lots of organizations including COBIT, ITIL, COSO, CMMI, and FAIR. COBIT is a framework that is comprehensive consisting of the models, analytical tools and the practices that are globally accepted and it is designed in order to help in the management and governance of the enterprise IT. The scope of COBIT has been expanded with the passage of time for completely supporting the IT governance, despite being rooted in the IT auditing. The latest version that is most commonly used in organizations is COBIT 5 that focuses on risk mitigation and risk management. ITIL is known as Information Technology Infrastructure Library that focuses on the management of IT services and aims for ensuring that the services of IT are supported by the business core processes. It consists of the five best practices of management that include design, service strategy, operation, continual service improvement and transition (i.e. change management). COSO is a model that is used for the evaluation of internal controls. This is designed by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO). It focuses on less IT specific things as compared to rest of the frameworks and concentrates more the aspects of the business i.e. fraud deterrence and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). CMMI is an acronym for Capability Maturity Model Integration which is a method developed by Software Engineering Institute and it is considered an approach for the improvement of the performance. It also uses a 1 to 5 scale for gauging the quality, performance and profitability maturity level of an organization. FAIR is an acronym for Factor Analysis of Information Risk that is a relatively recent model that is used for the quantification of risk in organizations. Its main focus is on the operational risk and the cyber security by the goal of designing decisions that are well-informed.