Opponent Report: IT Governance Practices in Tanzanian Public Sector

This document is a master thesis opponent report evaluating a thesis focused on IT governance practices within Tanzanian public organizations. The report provides an overview of the thesis, highlighting its strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. It addresses the thesis's introduction, theoretical framework, research methods, and findings. The opponent raises questions about the clarity of the thesis's purpose, the justification of the chosen research method, the evaluation of the research method, and the conciseness of the findings. The report concludes with an overall assessment, acknowledging the importance of the topic and the theoretical concepts presented, while also pointing out the need for a data analysis section, conclusion, and recommendations to strengthen the analysis of the research topic. The thesis explores the adoption of IT governance practices and their influence on the effectiveness of IT governance in Tanzanian public government organizations.

Running head: MASTER THESIS OPPONENT REPORT
Master Thesis Opponent Report

1MASTER THESIS OPPONENT REPORT
Master Thesis Opponent Report
Thesis title: IT Governance Practices in Public organizations: The Context of Tanzanian Public
Government Organizations
Student Name: Please fill
Opponent: Please fill
Overview of the project:
The thesis proposes to explore of adopted IT governance practices and its influence on the
effectiveness of the IT governance into Tanzanian public government organizations. The aim of
the thesis study is to gain knowledge on practices of IT governance for the public government
organizations within developing countries. The author claims that IT governance practices are
adopted and implemented for facilitating IT-business strategic alignment along with influencing
IT into public organizations. The author also argues that adoption of IT governance into a public
organization is considered to meet with expectations of the top management with using IT
resources. The goal of this thesis is to research on IT governance practices for influencing IT
governance into Tanzanian Government public organizations and how the adoption of IT
governance influences Tanzanian Government public organizations.
General comments:
I offered following general comments on entire thesis report:
1) The author starts with an introduction which defines problematic, outlines the analytical
concepts and evaluates the purpose of the study. A review of the theoretical framework is
used for the analysis, IT governance practices and business IT/alignment. The third

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chapter contains the research methods used to underline the arguments into the thesis. It
is quite a good starting point to work into thesis paper.
2) The thesis paper has some weakness that the style and argument of an author are rather
complicated at times. I think that there is little description regarding the research
methods. I could not be able to find more that should have brought up here so that the
research methods sound appropriate for the project.
3) In the findings section, there are various issues of how the theory and observed materials
connect in the way which the author promised into the introduction part. There should
be a logical discussion of the adoption of IT governance practices into public
organizations.
4) There is lack of theoretical connections in the thesis report, for example on page 29, the
author mentions senior managers involvement into information technology, but he does
not able to make connection explicit with selected research question.
Overall assessment:
The topic of this thesis is important and I can able to see that the author has made theoretical
concepts into the theoretical framework section, which is quite good. The secondary goal of this
thesis paper is quite satisfied, but the author has to add a data analysis section, conclusion and
recommendations section to analyze the selected research topic. The main goal of this thesis is to
elaborate the IT Governance practices which influence effective IT Governance in Tanzanian
Government public organization.
Opponent questions:
1. Was it easier to understand under laying purpose of the thesis paper? Comments.

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2. Do you consider that the report title reflects on the content of thesis report?
3. To what degree did the author justify a choice of method to tackle the research
problems?
4. Is the research method sufficiently evaluated?
5. Has the author set the findings concisely?