IT governance in Tanzanian public sector organisations

Abstract

In many public sector organisations, the use of Information Technology (IT) has become important for sustaining and extending public service delivery. This has caused there to be a critical dependency on IT, which calls for a specific focus on effective IT governance. Accordingly, the success factors for effective IT governance must be determined and adhered to if an organisation wishes to increase the contribution of IT towards achieving its objectives. Much research has been carried out on IT governance effectiveness and the necessary success factors, but not with a focus on organisations from a developing country such as Tanzania. The context in these organisations is characterised by IT resources, knowledge and culture constraints as well as by an increasing level of IT investment and applications. In this research, we analyse how IT governance practices are implemented in Tanzanian public sector organisations (TaPSOs) and benchmark their levels of maturity. Furthermore, we analyse and identify the critical success factors (CSFs) that contribute to effective IT governance in TaPSOs. Subsequently, we analyse the effects of these CSFs on IT governance performance and develop and evaluate a CSFs framework for implementing effective IT governance in TaPSOs. We find weak IT governance practices, especially in terms of processes. This was also pointed out by the lower level of IT governance maturity in TaPSOs in contrast to public sector organisations in developed countries. Furthermore, we find that the identified CSFs have a significant effect on IT governance performance in TaPSOs. In addition, the designed CSFs framework is found to be important for providing guidelines to be used by IT and business management personnel for implementing effective IT governance. This CSFs framework for implementing effective IT governance in TaPSOs consists of the IT governance focus areas, CSFs, activities, roles, IT resources and environment in which it should be implemented. In contrast to existing frameworks from the research literature, the designed CSFs framework offers a holistic view by focusing on the five IT governance focus areas.

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