Assessment of IT governance in organizations: A simple integrated approach

There are various methods available for dealing with IT governance. These methods are diversified, and in some cases lengthy and complicated. This paper is concerned with providing a unified simple approach for IT governance assessment. The approach is developed and tested through the following three main steps: (1) highlighting the basic requirements of IT governance considering key available methods; (2) designing the target approach that integrates these requirements and uses knowledge management principles; and (3) illustrating the use of the approach through a typical illustrative application. The approach uses the “STOPE: Strategy, Technology, Organization, People and Environment” view to integrate the issues involved, the knowledge management principles as an added value, and the six-sigma phases as a cyclic improvement process. The work provides “fifty” main IT governance controls; and these enable finding key strengths and weaknesses of IT governance in organizations from which development directions can be derived. It should be noted that considering knowledge management, and people as a main domain in the integration view, illustrate special emphasis of the human factor in IT governance.