Abstract:
The concept of organisational governance has been researched and debated by
many. However, the concept of organisational governance maturity and what
exactly this entails has received significantly less attention. It is beneficial for an
organisation to understand how far they have progressed with implementing the
various governance elements, as this will enable them to implement the most
appropriate and necessary next steps, while taking corrective actions in
becoming more mature in respect of organisational governance. This will
furthermore aid the internal audit activity to provide more effective internal audit
services, as knowledge of the level of organisational governance maturity
enables them to more accurately determine which service they should deliver –
either an assurance (organisation is mature) service or a consulting (organisation
is not mature) service.
The question now arises: how does an organisation, and the internal audit activity
in particular, determine the level of organisational governance maturity without a
benchmark of some sort that details the structures, systems and processes
required to support governance at various levels of maturity? Published maturity
frameworks/models can be used for this, however, there is very little that pertains
specifically, comprehensively and holistically to organisational governance. This
created the opportunity for the development of an organisational governance
maturity framework.
The main objective of this study is to develop a framework that can be used for
assessing the level of organisational governance maturity within South African
private sector organisations. Firstly, a comprehensive literature review was
conducted where eight governance-related maturity models were used to
produce a preliminary organisational governance maturity framework for the
private sector in South Africa. Secondly, interviews were conducted with key
governance stakeholders at the selected organisation to obtain input in the
preliminary framework. The research findings, which resulted from the data analysed, were used as a means to refine the preliminary framework developed
from the literature. No significant amendments were made to the preliminary
framework and input obtained during the interviews supported the relevance and
contribution of the framework developed from the literature.
