Critical Success Factors Framework for Implementing Effective IT Governance in Public Sector Organizations in a Developing Country

Today in many public sector organizations, the use of IT has become important in enabling public services delivery. This has caused a critical dependency on IT that call a specific focus on effective IT governance. Accordingly, the success factors for governance over IT resources must be established and adhered to if an organization has to increase the contribution of IT in achieving its objectives. Several researches have been done on such IT governance effectiveness and necessary success factors but with no focus on such organizations in a developing country like Tanzania (environment). Several frameworks for IT governance exist with various approaches. These include control frameworks such as COBIT, and IT service management such as ITIL. However none of these frameworks has looked at such improvement to effective IT governance from a high level and holistic view to Critical Success Factors (CSFs). Such view to CSFs on what few aspects to concentrate on for effective IT governance is paramount in such an environment, which on the one hand is characterized by higher IT resources, knowledge, and culture constraints and on the other hand by the increase of IT investment and applications. In this paper, based on design science research we have specifically addressed this gap by developing a CSFs framework for implementing effective IT governance in this environment (CEITG framework). It was mainly achieved using the four previous studies in this environment as a basis, opinions of 43 IT/business people from 25 organizations and 6 industry/academic experts and a case study in one of these organizations during its development and evaluation. This led to a high level and holistic view framework with concrete practices for effective IT governance implementation in this environment.