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IT governance is concerned with the oversight of IT assets, their contribution to business value and the mitigation of IT-related risks. Emerging research calls for more board level engagement in IT governance and identifies profound consequences for digitized organizations in case the board is not involved. Against this context, this article analyses how corporate governance codes are guiding boards to provide transparency on how they treat IT governance. The findings show that only the South African corporate governance code, King III, contains a significant amount of IT (governance)-related content. As a second objective, this article builds on these findings by providing an exploratory insight in the contemporary state of IT governance transparency in Belgian and South African companies. This way, the influence of the national corporate governance code on IT governance transparency is explored. The authors' findings show that South African firms tend to be more concerned with IT governance transparency in their annual reports than Belgian firms, given a comparable IT strategic role and ownership structure. Accordingly, the case is made for including more IT (governance)-related guidance in national corporate governance codes, as this might enable companies to be more transparent about their IT governance.

Researchers and practitioners seem to agree on the importance of boards of directors engaging in IT governance. Yet, only a minority of boards around the globe are taking up accountability for governing IT, pointing towards a knowing-doing gap. Efforts have been made to close this gap by creating implementation guidelines for this type of engagement. One of the most frequently mentioned guidelines is the implementation of an IT oversight or similar committee at board level. However, research shows that few boards have established such a committee, which might be caused by the lack of detailed guidance on the workings and role of such committees. This paper discusses the case of the University of Antwerp that has established two IT oversight committees at board level. We demonstrate how IT oversight committees can be established and how they fit into the role of the board with regard to IT governance.