The impact of Information Technology Governance maturity level on corporate productivity: A case study at an Information Technology services company

摘要

The positive impact of an organization's Information Technology (IT) Governance maturity level on the organization's business performance has been stated by many researchers in the IT governance literature. However, there are reports that casted a doubt on such a claim. This study, yet another exploration on the subject, is aimed at investigating any correlation between a company's IT governance maturity level and its business performance - represented by a number of productivity measures. The company under this study is a publicly-listed company in the IT services industry. The IT governance maturity level is measured using the maturity model provided by Control Objective for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) version 4.1. The productivity measures are the profit per employee and the total factor productivity. Through a non-parametric statistical hypothesis testing method - the Spearman Rank Correlation Test - a positive correlation is found between the maturity level and the profit-based productivity measure, but not the total factor productivity measure. Investigating the latter result, we discovered an interesting observation that might explain why some studies did not find any positive correlation between the maturity level and certain business performance measures. In our case, we found that there was an apparent time lag between the improvement of the company's IT Governance maturity level and the increase in the company's productivity level.