Abstract
Demands for involvement in IT governance no longer stop at the executive suite. They now make their way all the way up to the boardroom. So what to do? In this chapter, I suggest that boards of directors faced with demands to engage in IT governance take a measured, focused approach, rather than adopt wholesale current recommendations for board level IT governance.
This measured approach includes keeping IT governance activities close to the action – close to business processes, to value creation and to profit-and-loss responsibilities. It also includes monitoring issues that matter at board level, staying well informed about the role of IT for the organization and the industry, making sure that strategic processes integrate IT issues, and ensuring that IT governance activities are designed for dialogue and sensemaking, not only for monitoring and control.
The chapter also highlights factors that influence board level involvement in IT governance and points to the key difference between non-executive boards (the norm in for example the U.K. and Sweden) and boards that include internal directors (the traditional U.S. model). This distinction is crucial given the substantial American influences on current IT governance trends.