IT Governance

Information Technology Governance, IT Governance or ICT Governance, is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley (USA) and Basel II (Europe)), as well as the acknowledgment that IT projects can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization.

Problems with IT governance
Nicholas Carr has emerged as a prominent critic of the idea that information technology confers strategic advantage. This line of criticism might imply that significant attention to IT governance is not a worthwhile pursuit for senior corporate leadership. However, Carr also indicates counterbalancing concern for effective IT risk management.
The manifestation of IT governance objectives through detailed process controls (e.g. in the context of project management) is a frequently controversial matter in large scale IT management. See Agile methods. The difficulties in achieving a balance between financial transparency and cost-effective data capture in IT financial management (i.e., to enable chargeback) is a continual topic of discussion in the professional literature, and can be seen as a practical limitation to IT governance.

Relationship to other IT disciplines
IT governance is supported by disciplines such as:

- Business Service Management
- Business Technology Optimization
- Enterprise architecture
- IT asset management
- IT portfolio management
- IT security assessment
- IT service management
- Project governance Project management and Program management in the enterprise IT context (including software engineering where appropriate)