A Comparative Analysis of E-Governance and IT Governance

Abstract

In many organisations, the deployment of information technologies (IT) encounters various challenges such as processes redesign, infrastructure redundancy, and lack of alignment between business processes and IT artefacts. These challenges impede organisations productivity and competitiveness. As a means to mitigate against the challenges, approaches, such as e-governance and IT governance have been employed and practised in some organisations over the years. However, the e-governance and IT governance brings about more complication through their conflicting and duplicating functions in their deployment and use, which is often caused by inability to draw distinction between the two approaches. The implication of the challenges includes the fact that it hampers selection, implementation, use and management of information systems and technologies (IS/IT) artefacts within an organisation. The challenges are more common in developing countries such as Namibia, owing to the newness of the concept in the environment. Thus, this study employed a desk research approach to understand the implication of practice in the interchangeable use of the terms. A total of 52 articles were collected. The keywords egovernance and IT governance) were used as the main search criteria (. All articles were collected from accredited journals databases, such as Emerald, IEEE Explore Digital Library and Proquest. The collected articles were analysed, following the interpretive stance. From the findings, we highlight the commonality and distinction between the e-governance and IT governance. The article therefore proposes ways in which the two concepts can be employed separately or complementarily, to manage IS/IT activities and business processes without conflicts, within an environment.