Governance as a quality paradigm

Abstract

Corporate governance is viewed as one of the topical issues of the 21st century. Little focus has however been directed to date at the specific application of corporate governance to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) outsourcing companies. The research problem, which was researched reads as follows: “The application of inadequate or poorly formulated governance mechanisms within ICT outsourcing companies invariably lead to poor service delivery and substandard quality of outsourced deliverables, and which could ultimately lead to the outsourcing contract being cancelled at a significant loss of jobs and revenue to the industry”. The research question which was researched to mitigate the research problem, reads as follows: “Can a generic governance framework be formulated to address the specific governance requirements of ICT outsourcing organisations?” As a result, the objective of the research was to assess the extent to which known governance reference models, frameworks and standards address the specific governance requirements of ICT outsourcing companies.

The case study research method was utilised for the research as this type of research method allows for the establishment of in-depth data concerning the current governance mechanisms within the target organisation. The research study was supported by a governance efficiency survey conducted on a South African subsidiary of a multinational ICT outsourcing company, where the director‟s duties in respect of IT governance, were assessed. The questionnaire used in this research comprised of closed questions, based on the well known Likert scale. Primary data gleaned from the research survey was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics.

The survey returned that, although best practices pertaining to „governance‟ are mature, openly available and clearly described in literature, they are not necessarily widely adopted. This implies that in many organisations, there is significant room for improvement in the IT governance domain. The research furthermore returned that current known governance reference models, frameworks and standards to a limited extent, address the specific governance requirements of ICT outsourcing companies.

A generic IT Governance Framework was developed, providing a valuable contribution to the improvement of customer satisfaction levels, by suggesting practical models for the integration of processes, the organisation design of the service provider and outsource client, and the relationship between „governance‟ and „quality‟.