Governance of IT in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Enterprise governance of IT is the responsibility of the top layer of an entity to ensure IT is effective and efficient and provides value to the enterprise while keeping risks to an acceptable level. Enterprise governance of IT focuses on IT Value and IT Risk and consists of practices, organisational structures and relationships between executive and management. In Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SME’s) however, these structures and relationships very often rest in one person, the owner/entrepreneur. The CobiT framework helps managers deal with enterprise governance of IT. It is however too large and complex for application in SME’s and hence a simpler version called QuickStart was developed. It is not yet aligned with the latest version of CobiT5 and therefore does not sufficiently cover governance aspects. CobiT and QuickStart will be introduced but because the latter may still be too much for the smaller SME’s, a reduced version is proposed. The biggest value and risk challenge for SME’s is the acquisition of automated solutions because they often do not have sufficient capabilities to deal with it; they do not occur often and represent a relatively large risk. To address this, a set of acquisition guidelines is proposed. Finally four management practices that resulted from recent pragmatic research are proposed for SME leadership to consider.