The Board and IT Governance: A Replicative Study

The challenge of the corporate environment has been and remains one of competitive advantage. To address this challenge information technology (IT) is playing an ever-increasing role. Nowadays it is not uncommon to find IT entrenched in all business processes in the corporate environment, as it has become pervasive in nature. With this high dependence on IT, literature is paying a renewed attention to those responsible for the well-being of the organisation, namely the board, and its role in providing proper governance over IT. Earlier research indicated that complete control over IT was lacking since there was a general shortcoming of IT expertise or ability at board-level within the corporate environment. The question then that can rightfully be asked is whether any progress has taken place over the past few years in this regard. Hence, do boards today still lack IT expertise or ability in addressing their IT governance obligations in the corporate environment. Accordingly, this paper reports on a replicative study conducted in this area to answer this question. The results of this study suggest that certain progress has been witnessed, indicating that some improvement has taken place; nevertheless, much work still remains to be done in this area.   Key words: board of directors, board-level IT ability, board-level IT involvement, chief information officers, IT governance, IT oversight committees.