Preface

Information technology (IT) plays a key role in private organizations and is part of the business strategy, asking for IT leaders capable to effectively plan and manage IT resources of an organization that are including technology infrastructure, human resources and business/IT relationships (Brown et al. 2012). Furthermore, IT has also a pervasive role in society and public sphere, thus having a lot to offer to public organizations as well, which should be able to capture and govern the opportunities for internal change and new services offering. In fact, public organizations can benefit the most by using IT to achieve organization's strategies and improve their services. According to Campbell et al. (2009, p.7), “public sector organizations are a collection of a nation’s administrative and economic institutions that provide services and goods for and on behalf of the government”, and these types of organizations are dependent on governmental budget funding. In opinion of Hoch and Payan (2008), IT governance is a critical capability for the leaders in the public sector that are looking to create IT value. Furthermore, public organizations are now very committed to make more steps towards digitalization and transform their services. Therefore, this requires from organization’s management to focus on having an effective IT governance in their organization that as result will enable business/IT alignment and will create business value from IT investments. For this purpose, organization’s management has given a special attention to IT governance that has grown in importance. IT governance or enterprise governance of IT is defined as “an integral part of enterprise governance exercised by the board and address the definition and implementation of processes, structures and relational mechanisms in the organization that enable both business and IT people to execute their responsibilities in support of business/IT alignment and the creation of business value from IT-enabled business investments” (De Haes and Van Grembergen , p. 2). In fact, business/IT alignment is “the fit and integration among business strategy, IT strategy, business structures and IT structures” and is “an important driving force to achieve business value through investments in IT” (Van Grembergen and De Haes (2009, p. 6). According to Leonard and Seddon (2012), business/IT alignment is considered to be a key issue for organizations and is still the first top management concern for executives in organizations around the world