A look into successful IT Governance : A qualitative study in the financial sector

Information Technology (IT) has become an ever-growing element of almost every large enterprise. IT Governance has emerged as a way to ensure effective and efficient use of IT to enable organizations to achieve their goals. The purpose of this study is to investigate how successful IT Governance is characterized to aid the research effort in determining Critical Success Factors for IT Governance. This is performed by a qualitative study researching IT Governance professionals in the finance sector. The study finds that companies take inspiration from ITIL, COBIT, and SAFe to construct their own instructions and guidelines for how to operate their IT organizations. IT Governance instructions and guidelines must be anchored in the business strategy and well distributed and communicated throughout the organization. Alignment between IT and business is an important aspect shown to bolster success. IT Governance is largely about finding a balance between developing and optimizing while having a formalized structure that ensures that the overall goals of the organization are supported in a way that is compliant and risk averse.