Delving Into the IT Governance-Management Communication Interface: A Scoping Review

I. Introduction

IT governance has increased in importance because organizations base their core business activity on IT. Organizations are striving to derive value from IT investments using various mechanisms widely known in the literature (e.g. Peterson, 2004; Van Grembergen et al., 2004; Weill & Ross, 2004). Furthermore, organizations are directing IT plans to align them to business strategy as well as controlling and monitoring if the results are as expected (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993). However, although there are various recognized frameworks and standards (e.g. COBIT 2019 (ISACA, 2018) and ISO/IEC 38500 (ISO/IEC 38500, 2015)), some firms may still be managing the implementation of IT governance. The difficulties that organizations have in implementing IT governance may be owing to several causes:

• • There are many definitions of what IT governance is and how it differs from IT management, each having different approaches (Ko & Fink, 2010; Robb & Parent, 2009).

• • Allegedly, there are more popular topics in the definitions depending on the interests or needs of the author/researcher, showing no consensus (Raymond, Bergeron, Croteau, & Uwizeyemungu, 2019; Robb & Parent, 2009).

• • Several empirical studies show the theory-practice gap of implementing IT governance in organizations (Buchwald, Urbach, & Ahlemann, 2014; De Maere & De Haes, 2017; González-Rojas, Gómez-Morantes, & Beltrán, 2018; Daniël Smits & Van Hillegersberg, 2018b; Teo, Abd Manaf, & Choong, 2013).

• • Some barriers in the implementation of IT governance are related to social aspects such as lack of communication between IT governance and IT management, lack of understanding and trust, and different executives’ perceptions of IT business value (Buchwald et al., 2014; Parry & Lind, 2016; Phiri & Weiguo, 2013; Rahimi, Møller, & Hvam, 2016; Tallon, 2014; Teo, Manaf, & Choong, 2013; Yudatama, Nazief, & Hidayanto, 2017).