1
G
ETTING THE PRIORITIES RIGHT
:
L
ITERATURE VS
P
RACTICE ON
IT
G
OVERNANCE
Mårten Simonsson and Mathias Ekstedt, Ph.D.
Department of Industrial Information and Control Systems
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Osquldas väg 12, 7tr S-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
{ms101, mek101}@ics.kth.se
http://www.ics.kth.se
Abstract. 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 very 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.
Keywords: IT Governance, Prioritization, IT governance practitioners, IT governance literature