Information technology governance in public organizations: how perceived effectiveness relates to three classical mechanisms

Information technology (IT) governance has received a lot of attention lately, with a growing strategic importance currently being given to IT by both public and private organizations. This justifies the existence of a body of scientific literature on IT governance, to which this paper belongs and makes an attempt to contribute to. Towards that end, an empirical study was performed involving 57 public organizations of the Brazilian federal administration, examining the relationship between three governance mechanisms – IT steering committee, IT solution manager, and IT investment portfolio management process and IT governance effectiveness. Based on the literature review, a conceptual model was developed to express the causal relations that these constructs were expected to hold with one another. Through a custom-designed questionnaire submitted to over 180 federal public employees, the causal model was tested using mediation analysis and mostly confirmed. Results indicate that Portfolio Management should always be taken into account for analyses that aim to evaluate the effects of IT steering committees and solution managers on IT governance effectiveness. This means that a nonexistent or an underperforming Portfolio Management Process can lead to a reduction or cancellation of the potential positive contributions of the other two mechanisms to IT governance. By informing decision makers and public managers at some of the main federal public organizations in the country on how to plan and deploy IT to promote a more effective governance, the conclusions presented herein fill a previous knowledge gap in the complementarity and the joint effectiveness of three IT governance mechanisms on the IT dynamics of key public organizations.