Evolving IT Governance Model – Research Study on Croatian Large Companies

Abstract: In the early days of implementing IT in the business, it was often seen as a technical support function and was typically managed by finance departments. When evolving from technology providers into strategic partners, IT organizations typically follow a three-stage approach: IT infrastructure management, IT service management and IT business value management (IT Governance). As the IT initiatives has become far more than a means of improving efficiency and reducing costs and increasingly account for enabler of business innovation, it still seems that it is less understood business resource. One of reason could be that often there is no systematically way of measuring IT performances and implementing IT Governance practices. In this paper we investigated the practices by which IT can contribute to the business as well as how to measure it. Main objective of this paper is to stress the importance of evolving IT Governance activities. Similarities between corporate governance and IT governance are discussed in further details. On the sample of selected Croatian large companies, the organizational position and the role of IT in the business has been investigated, while specific research interest was to get the clear view of the maturity level of IT usage. We hoped that such approach could be useful when trying to answer the posed research question: what stage of IT maturity level (from technical support to IT Governance) reflects the IT practices in the Croatian large companies