Getting the Priorities Right: Literature vs Practice on IT Governance

The field of IT governance has emerged in order to address organizational issues for IT value delivery to the business. However, a shared view of the definition of IT governance is lacking between researchers and practitioners, and support for decision-making is neither present. A commonly agreed upon definition of IT governance would be useful but has until today not been available. This article presents an IT governance definition based on an extensive literature study. IT governance is the preparation for, making of and implementation of IT-related decisions regarding goals, processes, people and technology on a tactical or strategic level. The components of the definition are prioritized in two different ways. A theoretical prioritization was made to highlight the most important concerns according to 60 different publications. Another prioritization was carried out with a group of Swedish IT governance experts. The opinions of practitioners and literature did mostly align, but differences were identified in the importance of understanding the situation at hand prior to making decisions, and monitoring of the decisions´ impacts