Masters Degrees (School of Accountancy)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (School of Accountancy) by Subject "Application program interfaces (Computer software) -- Effectiveness"

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    A structured approach to the implementation of information technology (IT) governance principles to address application software project failure at a strategic and operational level
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2019-04) Van Vuuren, Nadine; Van Renen, Wandi; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. School of Accountancy.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY : Application software projects continue to fail at an alarming rate, despite extensive research on the subject and various attempts by organisations to prevent such failures. These failures are mainly attributable to the misalignment between an organisation’s business requirements, which are driven by the business strategy, and the capabilities of application software selected and implemented to support those business requirements. This misalignment is commonly referred to as the Information Technology (IT) gap. IT governance plays an integral role in the alignment of application software capabilities with business requirements to address the risks of application software project failure at a strategic and operational level. While it is apparent that control frameworks provide a critical foundation for implementing IT governance, these frameworks are generic and lack guidance on how organisations in different industries can practically implement IT governance principles to address software project failure. The purpose of the study is to develop a structured approach, based on IT governance principles, to provide organisations with practical guidance for addressing application software project failure by bridging the IT gap at a strategic and operational level. The development of the structured approach involved the following steps: - A recognised control framework was applied to identify potential failure factors that can contribute to application software project failure. A matrix was accordingly developed for aligning those failure factors with the applicable processes of the selected control framework to address software project failure at a strategic and operational level. This matrix can provide organisations with practical guidance for using the selected control framework to identify and address failure factors that can lead to the failure of application software projects. - A second matrix was also compiled for aligning a generic list of business imperatives with recommended software requirements to achieve business/IT alignment in software projects. This is based on the study’s recommendation that organisations should use their own unique business imperatives to drive the alignment between application software capabilities and business requirements, which can in turn mitigate the risk of application software project failure. In conclusion, the structured approach developed in this study can ultimately provide organisations in different industries with a set of practical guidelines for mitigating the risks of software project failure by applying IT governance principles to bridge the IT gap at both a strategic and operational level. Furthermore, all stakeholders involved in application software projects can use the above two matrixes as guidelines to engage in the selection, design and implementation of application software to ultimately support an organisation’s strategic objectives.