The capability levels of IT governance for South African organisations

Abstract

The reliance of business strategy on Information Technology (IT) is characterised by the impact that IT failure has on organisations. Effective IT governance is acknowledged as a mechanism for supporting business in achieving its objectives by aligning IT to business, and ensuring that the benefits are realised from IT investments. Capability level assessment provides a methodology for measuring and analysing the state of IT governance capability levels. This study reports the results of the IT governance capability levels within South African organisations.An on-line survey questionnaire was developed using the COBIT framework as a foundation for measuring capability levels, this questionnaire was used for collecting data required for the research. A five point likert-scale was used to rate 25 questions from strongly agree “5” to strongly disagree “1”. The responses were averaged and converted into capability levels of 1 to 5, with level 1 being ad-hoc process and level 5 being optimal process. A total of 34 surveys were completed from diverse industries that spend between 10 and 41% of their budget on IT. Statistical t-test and ANOVA techniques were applied to calculate the average capability levels and test the correlations amongst variables.The results indicated that the industry type has no effect on the IT governance capability level, as 78% of the observed samples showed no correlation. However, the study found that there is a strong, positive correlation between the percentage of budget that is spent on IT and IT governance capability levels, with a 96% correlation from the observed sample. Finally, IT risk management was hailed as the most important IT governance principle by many organisations.By establishing the correlations between capability levels and industry type, as well as correlations between capability levels and the amount of the budget spent on IT, this study has revealed that investing in IT has an impact on the effectiveness of IT governance. This study also revealed that IT risk management, which is a significant element of corporate governance, receives priority from management.