The discipline of information technology governance first emerged in 1993 as a derivative of corporate governance and deals primarily with the connection between an organisation's strategic objectives, business goals and IT management within an organization. It highlights the importance of value creation and accountability for the use of information and related technology and establishes the responsibility of the governing body, rather than the chief information officer or business management.
The primary goals for information and technology (IT) governance are to (1) assure that the use of information and technology generate business value, (2) oversee management's performance and (3) mitigate the risks associated with using information and technology. This can be done through board-level direction, implementing an organizational structure with well-defined accountability for decisions that impact on the successful achievement of strategic objectives and institutionalize good practices through organizing activities in processes with clearly defined process outcomes that can be linked to the organisation's strategic objectives.
Following corporate governance failures in the 1980s, a number of countries established codes of corporate governance in the early 1990s:
Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (USA)
Cadbury Report (UK)
King Report (South Africa).
As a result of these corporate governance efforts to better govern the leverage of corporate resources, specific attention was given to the role of information and the underpinning technology to support good corporate governance. It was soon recognized that information technology was not only an enabler of corporate governance, but as a resource, it was also a value creator that was in need of better governance.
In Australia, the AS8015 Corporate Governance of ICT was published in January 2005. It was fast-track adopted as ISO/IEC 38500 in May 2008.[3]
IT governance process enforces a direct link of IT resources & process to enterprise goals in line of strategy. There is a strong correlation between maturity curve of IT governance and overall effectiveness of IT.