<p>One of the best ways to get expected results from information technology (IT) in a business organization is to have a close look at the financial issues related to it. Financial issues such as IT investment, IT costs, IT resources should be dealt with special care if any organization wants to get best result from its IT systems. The purpose of this research is to investigate the condition of IT financial issues such as IT investment, IT costs, IT resources, IT business value etc. in the selected seven organizations of Sweden and to have an understanding behind the condition. First of all, a survey has been conducted with nine IT managers from these seven organizations to get an overview of the condition of dealing with various IT financial issues. Then follow-up interviews have been conducted with four of those IT managers that took part in the survey to find out the reason behind the condition dealing with those IT financial issues. The results of the study show that most the seven companies do not have proper capital budgeting technique, benefit identification plan for IT investment. Most of them do not calculate all the IT related costs. Most of them have lack of knowledge about the business value of IT. Their knowledge of impact of IT resources is not clear. The study further shows why those seven companies are having that kind of condition regarding the IT related financial issues.</p>

One of the best ways to get expected results from information technology (IT) in a business organization is to have a close look at the financial issues related to it. Financial issues such as IT investment, IT costs, IT resources should be dealt with special care if any organization wants to get best result from its IT systems. The purpose of this research is to investigate the condition of IT financial issues such as IT investment, IT costs, IT resources, IT business value etc. in the selected seven organizations of Sweden and to have an understanding behind the condition. First of all, a survey has been conducted with nine IT managers from these seven organizations to get an overview of the condition of dealing with various IT financial issues. Then follow-up interviews have been conducted with four of those IT managers that took part in the survey to find out the reason behind the condition dealing with those IT financial issues. The results of the study show that most the seven companies do not have proper capital budgeting technique, benefit identification plan for IT investment. Most of them do not calculate all the IT related costs. Most of them have lack of knowledge about the business value of IT. Their knowledge of impact of IT resources is not clear. The study further shows why those seven companies are having that kind of condition regarding the IT related financial issues.

In today’s dynamic and often unstable business environment, Information technology (IT) and how IT is controlled has become pervasive due to the high dependency of IT within organizations. The IT-investments are increasingly becoming more important within the overall budget for many organizations today and are distributed all over the organizations. This dependency requires the importance of aligning between IT units and how the strategy for business direction can be realized. Thus, the alignment between IT and business is the primary goal of IT. A clear and well-defined structure of what factors affect the organization to ensure control over IT is utterly important. Today, no straightforward structure of factors to ensure successful achievement of IT governance goals within organizations exists. This thesis aims to assess and analyze the importance of IT governance factors to successfully achieve IT governance goals. The survey data gathered from 40 IT governance experts are presented in this thesis. The results show that there exist differences on how factors affect, with factors concerning the boards’ responsibility being the most important and critical factors for successfully achieving IT governance goals. This thesis also identifies and discusses some of the factors that may be less important and hence seldom prioritized within organizations.