The Role of Compliance Requirements in IT Governance Implementation: An Empirical Study Based on COBIT 2019

Abstract

Rooted in the conformance perspective of IT governance, this paper sets out to research the role of compliance requirements in IT governance implementation, and to shed light on what aspects (i.e., processes) of IT governance are important under different levels of compliance requirements. Based on a large and diverse sample of organizations (N=2566), our results indicate that IT governance implementation level (over five different process domains) consistently goes up with increasing compliance requirements, and that these jumps in IT governance implementation levels are always statistically significant. Moreover, we identify the IT governance processes that are of primary importance for each level of compliance requirements.