Anticlue

IT governance and business

A few thoughts on it governance and business, just exactly what is IT governance? Governance refers to assigning the authority to make decisions and a level of accountability for those decisions, hopefully that combination will motivate the individual or body to act in the best spirit of the business.

Governance covers how one runs a business, there is the long term vision, the daily operations, and the foundation upon which the business is built.

It is often said if you are going to go someplace, you have to have a plan how to get there. This is the strategy component of governance, it is the vision of where you want to go, and strategy also comprises how to pay for it, and how to overcome the obstacles along the way. In this area, enterprise business planning is the IT governance module. It is the creation of business cases, with return on investment, present value, and future values of the dollars of the case. The business cases are immediately entered into the budgeting process. There also needs to be defined criteria for what projects need to be a business case. For example, I’d be willing to gander that any project that comprises over $40,000 and 1000 man hours is a business case. That’s a lot of resource in a healthcare environment.

The next portion of governance is the daily operations, keeping things going. There are a lot of parts to IT, network, hardware, software, and applications. The collage of how it all works together is at times mystical. And then there are the new items we need to accomplish, setting priorities to projects, and ensuring there are enough resources and funds to get the job done is a key factor of the daily operations. Also creating and maintaining a collaborative relationship with your business counterparts is a essential to managing operations. Finally you don’t really know what you have done if there isn’t a way to measure it, so a measurement criteria for success is necessary.

Finally, since you have a plan and daily work, there needs to be a standard for how things are done. If everyone manages a project the same way, the practice of thinking of things as a project becomes the standard way of doing business. There needs to be guidelines of the technical architecture, for example if the house is a vb shop, maybe implementing that new opensource alpha ware in ruby isn’t a great choice. Also maybe your company can’t take the risk of buying software from a mom and pop shop, vendors need to be able to display their ability to execute. And hear there are also the basics, like how to move things into production, how to maintain the inventory of assets that the department has.

These three components comprise an IT governance structure, in reviewing them wouldn’t these be good to have in any business?