Business Alignment of Information Technology Governance Planning at a Professional Council in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Information technology governance is often out of sync with business processes in many organisations. This was also the case for a professional council in South Africa, which experienced a lack of a coherent IT system design and disparaged registration, finance, and external verification systems inherited from previous systems that were incompatible with new system innovations to ensure efficient operations. This resulted with employees struggling to register social science professionals during lockdown as a result of Covid-19 pandemic. After recognising this, a South African professional council embarked on a digital transformation process to modernise the organisation by implementing an architectural aspect of information governance. This chapter used one of the three Control Objective for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) concepts - align, plan, and organise - to explore the business alignment of information technology governance planning at a professional council in South Africa. From a business perspective, the COBIT framework provides an integrated, top-to-bottom approach to IandT governance. Participatory Action Research (PAR) was used as the research method in this critical emancipatory study because the project required collaboration between the researchers and study participants in defining and solving the problem. The Look phase getting to know stakeholders so that the problem is defined on their terms and the problem definition is reflective of the community context;the Think phase interpretation and analysis of what was learnt in the Look phase;and the Act phase planning, implementing, and evaluating, based on information collected and interpreted in the other phases, were followed. The chapter established that no common enterprise architecture was adopted to aid in the development of business process, information, data, application, and technology architecture layers, as well as reusable building block components. A process flow of information governance components is suggested. It is hoped that the flow chart will aid in the alignment of information technology governance and business goals, as well as to ensure continuity in the event of disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.