IT governance has emerged as the basic tool for assessing and evaluating decisions on organizational IT initiatives. Almost every organization with reasonably large IT investments has either implemented or is exploring the possibilities of implementing IT governance in order to extract maximum value out of every dollar spent on their IT resources. Organizations assess their present and future IT requirements and develop a suitable model/framework to initiate IT governance activities at their place. However, several organizations fail to identify an appropriate IT governance framework matching their organizational needs1. Several models and frameworks are available today, developed based on international standards, like ITIL, COBIT, ISO, SAS and Six Sigma (Craig Symons, 2005). This paper discusses the main objectives of IT governance and elaborates on the best of available and widely used industry standards in structuring IT governance framework.

Information Technology (IT) has become an important element for any business activity in optimizing operations, improving product quality, complying with statutory requirements, and managing risk and security. This high dependence also resulted in the IT budgets moving northwards. Thus, it is required for the management to optimize IT investment and extract maximum value out of every dollar spent on IT resources. This is particularly true for the listed companies as the managers in such firms deal with the shareholders money. Besides, the surveys also indicated more than half of complicated IT implementation projects like ERP Packages end up in failure and cost the firms billions of dollars, which is the shareholders money. This resulted in the need for having appropriate IT governance practices in place.

IT governance is a subset of the corporate governance system of an organization. IT governance institute suggests that IT governance is the responsibility of board of directors and executive management. IT governance has gained more importance after the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (of USA) and Basel II norms as they focus a lot compliance of the internal control systems which is not possible without a proper IT governance system in place.

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