First seminar in the Open IS-seminar series. Every first Wednesday in each month.
February 2, 2011 from 12-13.00 in sal 6405A, BYO (bring your own) sandwich or lunch.
Welcome!
Title: The effect of Critical Success Factors on IT governance performance
in public sector organizations in a developing country
Key word: IT Governance
By: Lazar Rusu and Edephonce Nfuka
Abstract
Today in many public sector organizations, the use of IT has become ubiquitous in every facet of the organizations’ endeavours in supporting and evolving public services delivery. This ubiquitous use of technology have caused a critical dependency on IT, which in this environment involves a complex mix of political, organizational, technical and cultural concerns that call a specific focus on effective IT governance. Accordingly, the success factors for governance over these organizations IT resources must be entrenched and adhered to if they have to increase contribution of IT in achieving their objectives. Several researches have been done on such IT governance and necessary success factors in these organizations. Yet with no focus to such organizations in a developing country like Tanzania, which on one hand is characterized by IT resources, knowledge, and culture constraints and on other hand by the increase of IT investments and applications.
However, recently, based on IT governance focus areas and five organizations from this environment, an exploratory study to address such a gap has been pursued specifically on identifying Critical Success factors (CSFs) for effective IT governance. Although based on such a study it is reasonable to believe that these CSFs have effect to IT governance performance, this has not been confirmed. In this paper we have specifically addressed such a gap by hypothesizing that such correlated effect exists and we deductively examined it.
This was achieved based on a developed research model, survey research method, sample data from Tanzanian public sector organizations and a second generation structural equation modelling technique namely partial least squares (PLS). The result indicated significant moderate to high positive effects to IT governance. The CSF with most significant effect was “Involve and get support of senior management” and the least “Consolidate, standardize and manage IT infrastructure and application to optimize costs and information flow across the organization”. Finally a CSFs model for effective IT governance in this environment was also suggested. The findings provide more focus on CSFs that have a higher impact on IT governance performance in public sector organizations in a developing country and can improve available approaches.