The development of an integrated framework in order to address King III’s IT governance principles at a strategic level

Abstract

In today’s technologically advanced business environments, Information Technology (IT) has become the center of most businesses’ strategic activities. It is for this reason that the King III report has dedicated a chapter to addressing IT governance principles, holding the board of directors (senior management) responsible for addressing such principles. The King III report does provide broad level guidance, however lack sufficient detail on its interpretation. Although various guidelines in the form of IT control frameworks -models and -standards exist, it remains theoretical in nature and companies tend to implement these guidelines in an ad hoc manner. This ad hoc implementation of controls leads to unnecessary controls being implemented, resulting in an ineffective IT governance system that does not address each key strategic risk area. The objective of this research is to develop an integrated best practices framework, which will provide guidance to senior management in how to effectively and efficiently address King III’s IT governance principles by taking a business’ unique strategic objectives into account. A detailed literature review was performed of different control frameworks,-models and standards. These were analysed to identify a list of similar and overlapping control areas. These control areas were thereafter mapped to a list of strategic objectives applicable to most businesses. In doing so, effective and efficient IT governance principles which are understood by senior management, are able to be implemented.

A structured approach to strategic alignment between business and information technology objectives

“…Even though extensive research has been conducted on the manner in which technology can be incorporated into the design of business models, research relating to the design of technology architecture in line with the unique business models of entities, which should enable the achievement of an entity's overall business strategies (Boshoff, 2014), is not readily available. Previous studies by, inter alia, Goosen and Rudman (2013) and Smit (2009) attempted to develop business imperatives that can be used as IT objectives. However, these studies were not complete since they were not linked to established models or frameworks and were not grounded in theory.…”

Distinctive organisational business imperatives of Big Data: a literature review

“…Big Data provides real-time actionable information (Bhimani and Willcocks, 2014), enabling knowledge managers to make more accurate and informed decisions (Goosen and Rudman, 2013). By being able to predict the effect of changes more accurately, knowledge managers will be able to take a pro-active management approach by anticipating possible outcomes (Bhimani and Willcocks, 2014) and, consequently, be able to act faster and more effectively if the changes do occur.…”

Exploring the Contemporary State of Information Technology Governance Transparency in Belgian Firms

“…It should be noted that the Belgian corporate governance code does not contain provisions or guidelines regarding IT governance in specific, as opposed to e.g. South-African's King III code on corporate Governance which explicitly refers the need to disclose IT governance information in the yearly report (Butler & Butler, 2010;Goosen & Rudman, 2013). However, the Belgian code mentions e.g.…”