Information Technology Governance, IT Governance is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives, for instance Sarbanes-Oxley in the USA and Basel II in Europe, as well as the acknowledgment that IT projects can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization.

A characteristic theme of IT governance discussions is that the IT capability can no longer be a black box. The traditional involvement of board-level executives in IT issues was to defer all key decisions to the company's IT professionals. IT governance implies a system in which all stakeholders, including the board, internal customers, and in particular departments such as finance, have the necessary input into the decision making process. This prevents IT from independently making and later being held solely responsible for poor decisions. It also prevents critical users from later finding that the system does not behave or perform as expected, as explained in the Harvard Business Review article by R. Nolan:

A board needs to understand the overall architecture of its company's IT applications portfolio … The board must ensure that management knows what information resources are out there, what condition they are in, and what role they play in generating revenue…

There are narrower and broader definitions of IT governance. Weill and Ross focus on "Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behaviour in the use of IT.

Definitions: In contrast, the IT Governance Institute expands the definition to include foundational mechanisms: "… the leadership and organisational structures and processes that ensure that the organisation’s IT sustains and extends the organisation’s strategies and objectives.

While AS8015, the Australian Standard for Corporate Governance of ICT, defines Corporate Governance of ICT as "The system by which the current and future use of ICT is directed and controlled. It involves evaluating and directing the plans for the use of ICT to support the organisation and monitoring this use to achieve plans. It includes the strategy and policies for using ICT within an organisation."