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Top1. Introduction
In today’s competitive business environment, organizations are relying heavily on IT for business value creation (Anderson, Banker, & Ravindran, 2006; Chari, Devaraj, & David, 2008; Kohli & Grover, 2008). This leads to an increased focus on the governance and management of IT (De Haes & Van Grembergen, 2015; Wilkin & Chenhall, 2010), required to ensure that the expected business value creation is effectively realized and the associated risks are under control. In order to implement governance and management of enterprise IT, organizations are often drawing upon the practical relevance of industry frameworks such as “Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology” (COBIT), currently in its fifth edition, and released by the “Information Systems Audit & Control Association” (ISACA). The framework is built around a set of governance and management enablers and their support in the achievement of IT-related goals and, ultimately, enterprise goals (ISACA, 2012a).
COBIT-based implementations are gaining popularity as COBIT is the framework of choice for enterprise governance and management of IT in many organizations (Debreceny & Gray, 2013; IT Governance Institute (ITGI), 2011; Smits & Hillegersberg, 2013). However, adopting the guidance as described in the COBIT framework requires a considerable amount of effort and is often perceived as complex and costly, while return in stakeholder value is difficult to measure in tangible outcomes (De Haes, Van Grembergen, & Debreceny, 2013; Pereira & da Silva, 2012).
COBIT-based research is still scarce, especially empirical research (Mangalaraj, Singh, & Taneja, 2014). As COBIT is an extensive framework, empirical research often requires large datasets, which are not easily collected. Moreover, with the release of COBIT 5 in 2012, incorporating some significant changes towards a better focus on IT governance, most of the existing research is somewhat outdated. As stated by Mangalaraj et al. (2014), “It is time for IS researchers to examine this important framework, as research on COBIT is highly relevant to IS as its principles directly match with IT governance.”
In answer to this call, this research has two objectives:
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Provide an international benchmark on how organizations are adopting COBIT 5 proposed management and governance processes around enterprise IT;
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Investigate if adoption of these management and governance processes relates to better achievement of enterprise goals.
The conceptual model used in this research is entirely based on COBIT 5 (Figure 1). The three main constructs are discussed in the next section.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a theoretical background by discussing the main constructs for this research. Section 3 presents the research approach. A discussion of the results is presented in section 4, followed by the conclusion in section 5.