IT governance in Estonian business: high awareness, low readiness

Significant part of Estonian companies still has a long way to go in digitalization process, although almost every business considers IT a critical part of activity, has been cleared by a research conducted by Maksim Mozajev, Diego Paramo and Kirill Krabu.

As a result of qualitative and quantitative analyses conducted, the research group found that many Estonian businesses have evaluated importance of digitalization as extremely important and business dependence on digital processes ranging as totally dependent. However, just a few companies have acknowledged that they use strategic performance management for IT and consider IT a strategic asset on a management level. The rest of the companies either do not consider digitalization strategically or do it in a left-over manner.

Most respondents stated that their businesses depend on the IT in a significant way. Some companies say that just turning off the internet means stop of work. Others say that the whole business is run only through the computer. But, despite of the significance of IT, just less than a half of respondents really have a strategic plan of digitalization or digital assets management.

The role of IT has truly changed, yet decision-makers still have some steps to take for introducing IT governance to their organizations. Only 2% of top managers acknowledge the need to have a strong leadership over digitalization in their companies.

The research has revealed that according to the IT governance maturity framework, the surveyed organizations, in overwhelming majority, belong to the two lowest maturity levels. Therefore, the practice of IT governance among the reviewed Estonian companies has been identified as of low level.

Introduction of IT is complex and moving towards digital business processes needs effort. Concerning this, the authors propose a simple IT governance model that has been derived from the globally recognized IT governance best practices. The model is supposed to allow companies that have no IT governance expertise to consider IT strategically.

One of the main activity areas of Krabu Grupp includes digital transformation consulting and enabling services supporting businesses on their way to digitalization. Concerning different surveys held during last years, businesses that won’t implement digital transformation in the nearest future may have significant difficulties with surviving in the competition with digitally-enabled market counterparts. Currently, Krabu Grupp offers IT consultancy and digital transformation implementation services within Basic, Advanced and Full service packages, allowing businesses with different levels of IT-maturity adopt digital solutions in an optimal and sustainable way.

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