Working Papers on Information Systems ISSN 1535-6078 Centralization issues in IT governance: The role and responsibilities of the IT Control Officer from a European perspective Egon W. Berghout Alea Fairchild Abstract The need for transparency in IT governance, due to several factors such as cost and regulatory pressure, has led to organisations putting into place an IT Control Officer to oversee and audit IT activities. This paper examines the initial results of a European CIO-level survey designed to increase the understanding regarding the possible roles of the IT Control Officer and the authority given to that person. This research confirms the intuitive idea that increasing the role of the IT Control Officer also improves IT control. The increasing role in this sense is a more centralised and more senior position with additional responsibilities and administrative controls. This research also examines a perspective on the various intermediate possibilities of decentralised and less senior scenarios. Keywords: IT Control IT Governance IT Organisation Information Systems Evaluation MIS Theoretical frameworks empirical research case studies corporate politics Permanent URL: http://sprouts.aisnet.org/5-31 Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License Reference: Berghout, Egon, Fairchild, Alea (2005). "Centralization issues in IT governance: The role and responsibilities of the IT Control Officer from a European perspective," University of Groningen, Netherlands . Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, 5(31). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/5-31 Sprouts - http://sprouts.aisnet.org/5-31