An Empirical Assessment of Shared Understanding in IT Governance Implementation

Drawing on literature about social alignment and shared understanding between different internal stakeholders, this study sets out to analyze the association between stakeholder functional role and the perceived level of IT governance implementation. Specifically, this paper takes a COBIT 5 perspective, by first analyzing perception differences at the level of the implementation of the seven COBIT 5 enablers, followed by an analysis at the level of the five COBIT 5 process domains. The results indicate that shared understanding about the IT governance implementation level between different organizational stakeholders can be improved, especially between (1) IT and (2) audit, risk, and compliance (ARC) stakeholders.