Effective IT governance in healthcare organisations: A tale of two organisations

Extracting value from investments in IT has been a perennial problem for healthcare organisations. IT governance provides a systematic framework to establish governing principles and decision rights over IT investments, IT architecture, IT infrastructure and applications. Set against the IT Governance Institute's five domains of IT governance, this case study provides insight into two distinctly different healthcare organisations and their incredibly similar efforts at building and sustaining effective IT governance. Both organisations have hierarchical IT governance committee structures with broad representation from across the organisation. Additionally both have chosen to implement an IT programme/portfolio management office (PMO) capability to deliberately and explicitly build IT governance supporting processes to assess strategic alignment, risk management, resource use, IT portfolio performance measurement and IT value delivery. Using case study data, evidence is presented to suggest that the five domains of IT governance (strategic alignment, risk management, resource management, performance measurement and value delivery) are antecedents of IT governance effectiveness.