Information Technology Reference
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out on Weill and Ross, when referencing decision
making mechanisms. A business strategy, and an
IT strategy, should have the right organizational
structure to be implemented. This is also seen by
Van Grembergen (Van Grembergen 2004), and
other institutions (Symons 2005).
Two key concepts on IT governance should
be considered when talking about organizational
structures: responsibility and accountability (Weill
2003). It is important to establish accountability
and responsibility in the organization for every IT
initiative, not at the management level, but at the
board level. Furthermore, some authors consider
to define and implement the IT Governance Office
(Weill 2003), that will be the delegation of the
board in terms of implementing IT governance,
as well as analyzing, reporting and handling IT
governance issues.
Taking this in mind, the research is divided in two
phases. In the first phase, the status of IT gover-
nance is analyzed from the management point of
view, trying to identify links between the state of
the organization (and its structure, organization
and mechanisms) and some of the elements of
IT governance. The second phase was differently
conceived: the aim is to identify the status of IT
governance on the organizations, as well as the
degree of awareness of IT governance.
The methodology used in both phases is de-
scribed below:
•
The definition of a questionnaire to present
to managing directors/owners and IT man-
agers (if existing) of Spanish SMOs.
•
The selection and/or capturing of compa-
nies or organizations that can participate
on this research.
it processes
The organizational structures need to be com-
plemented by IT governance processes. These
processes should allow to implement effective
IT governance mechanisms, such as service
level agreements (SLAs), but also chargeback
mechanisms (Weill 2003). Van Grembergen (Van
Grembergen 2004) goes beyond, identifying not
only these processes, but also consider the imple-
mentation of COBIT and ITIL, as well as specific
processes such as strategic decision making.
•
Questionnaire pre-test, on a small group of
SMOs.
•
Modification of the questionnaire, in or-
der to incorporate the conclusions of this
pre-test.
•
Interviews with MDOs (managing direc-
tors/owners) of companies/organizations,
in order to obtain the information of the
questionnaire.
•
Analysis of the information gathered.
•
Identification of preliminary conclusions
for IT Governance in SMOs.
performance Management
the first phase
COBIT (ITGovernanceInstitute 2007) identifies
performance management as one of the elements
of IT governance, and identifies a set of processes
and metrics to control it. Other authors analyzed
the concept of IT balanced scorecard (Van Grem-
bergen 2003; Van Grembergen 2008) identifying
even a set of metrics and indicators for this.
The first phase finished last year, and did not
consider the recent publications mentioned be-
fore: the standard ISO 38.500:2000 (ISO 2008)
and the Calder-Moir framework (Calder 2007).
The elements of IT governance were analyzed
from a practical perspective. The focus was to
identify best practices on organizations and the
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