Today, May 27, 2009 our colleague Edephonce Nfuka, PhD student at DSV from Stockholm University has defended successfully his Licentiate Thesis named: “Towards an Effective IT Governance in the Public Sector Organizations in a Developing country. A case Study of Tanzania”.
On behalf on our research group in IT Management I would like to congratulate Edephonce Nfuka for his very good work done till now and to wish him “Good luck and success towards PhD”. Furthermore I would like to notice here that he is the first student from our research group who has defended his Licentiate of Philosophy thesis in the area of IT Management. Last but not the least I would like to thanks to all the participants in this seminar.
An abstract of Edeponce Nfuka’s licentiate thesis and a picture after the seminar is following below.
Abstract
Today in many organizations in the public sector, the use of IT has become pervasive in every facet of the organizations’ endeavours in supporting and evolving public services delivery. This pervasive use of technology have caused a critical dependency on IT, which in this environment involves a complex mix of political, organizational, legal, technical, resources and cultural concerns that call a specific focus on IT governance. According to IT governance Institute, IT governance is an integral part of enterprise governance and consists of the leadership and organizational structures and processes that ensure the enterprise’s IT sustains and extends the organization’s strategies and objectives. Several researches have been done on IT governance effectiveness in many organizations, however, none of them have specifically focused on the public sector from Tanzania as a developing country. In addition, the research results and frameworks in place do not completely address some specific concerns and success factors related to governance of IT in this environment, which on one hand is characterized by IT resources, knowledge, and culture constraints and on the other hand by an increase of IT investments and applications. In this research, we have assessed the state of IT governance in some important Tanzanian organizations from the public sector (previously unexplored) and identified the critical success factors to consider for effective IT governance in this environment. For the assessment we have used IT Governance Assessment Process (ITGAP) model and IT governance focus areas to analyze five organizations that are important actors from Tanzanian public sector. The results indicate a diverse IT governance mechanisms related to structures, processes and relational mechanisms to be in place with major weaknesses in IT decision making and monitoring processes. In addition, the results indicate relatively lower IT governance maturity and performance level in contrast with some similar research results from developed countries. Furthermore, the results indicate diverse problems related to IT governance focus areas and their potential consequences towards the efforts for an effective IT governance in this environment. Moreover, based on IT governance focus areas, we have identified eleven critical success factors for effective IT governance practices in these public sector organizations from Tanzania and proposed the future research directions for improving the IT governance in the public sector organizations from this environment.
