An Academic Exploration into the Core Principles and Building Blocks of COBIT 5

3. Enterprise Governance Of It

IT governance is a concept that has increasingly become an important issue in the IT area. It is not exactly clear when the concept as we understand it now originated. In 1998, the IT Governance Institute (www.itgi.org) was founded to disperse the IT governance concept in the practitioner area. In academic literature, articles mentioning IT governance in the title or abstract also emerged in the 1990’s (e.g. Brown & Magill, 1994; Sambamurthy & Zmud, 1999), mostly focusing on the centralization – decentralization debate. In the context of one of the mini-tracks at the academic Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS), IT governance was defined more from an holistic organizational perspective as “the organizational capacity exercised by the board, executive management and IT management to control the formulation and implementation of IT strategy and in this way ensure the fusion of business and IT” (Van Grembergen, 2002).