National Corporate Governance Codes and IT Governance Transparency in Annual Reports

Abstract

IT governance is concerned with the oversight of IT assets, their contribution to business value and the mitigation of IT-related risks. Emerging research calls for more board level engagement in IT governance and identifies profound consequences for digitized organizations in case the board is not involved. Against this context, this article analyses how corporate governance codes are guiding boards to provide transparency on how they treat IT governance. The findings show that only the South African corporate governance code, King III, contains a significant amount of IT (governance)-related content. As a second objective, this article builds on these findings by providing an exploratory insight in the contemporary state of IT governance transparency in Belgian and South African companies. This way, the influence of the national corporate governance code on IT governance transparency is explored. The authors' findings show that South African firms tend to be more concerned with IT governance transparency in their annual reports than Belgian firms, given a comparable IT strategic role and ownership structure. Accordingly, the case is made for including more IT (governance)-related guidance in national corporate governance codes, as this might enable companies to be more transparent about their IT governance.