Rethinking the Concept of IT Governance: Interdisciplinary Reflections

Abstract

The concept of information technology governance (ITG) was developed with foundations in organizational studies on corporate governance, but with a central element (information technology/information systems) in the field of information systems (IS). The ITG concept has become broad and ambiguous with inaccurate assessments leading researchers to adopt a nominal view of the theme. The ITG has a weak theoretical and ontological basis and its concept in the literature is not clear. Thus, the authors established as a research aim to analyze and discuss the composition of the ITG concept in an interdisciplinary perspective. The literature of governance, corporate governance, and IS were used as the basis for the analysis of the formation of the ITG concept. ITG studies were consulted and 79 textual corpora were analyzed in light of the techniques of content and lexical analysis. The analyses allowed rethinking the concept of ITG by considering that the theme must include both governance mechanisms and have a central element that represents the Information Technologies or Information Systems.