A Study of the Causal Relationship between IT Governance Inhibitors and Its Success in Korea Enterprises

In recent years, the emergence of the term IT Governance (ITG) has pointed to the increasing importance for business of effecting an alignment between its strategic direction and IT units. Many leading organizations have turned to ITG to pursue gains in efficiency, accountability, and regulatory and other forms of compliance, without, however, being able to implement coherent IT schemes on account of a number of challenging issues. Despite the growing interest of academics and practitioners in this area (as attested in recent publications), few studies have characterized the practical inhibitors frustrating the implementation of effective ITG. This paper, therefore, aims to examine empirically how inhibiting features associated with ITG affect the success of IT activities. Through a literature review, we identify 5 factors that work to restrain ITG implementation. Further, this work presents survey data gathered from 96 leading companies in Korea reporting the status of ITG practices according to a specific instrument of its own design.