IT governance

Implementing an appropriate IT governance framework - a current CIO top-three issue - is fundamental to achieving full integration of business and IT strategy. The current drivers of the interest in IT governance include:

* Corporate governance;
* The need to improve the effectiveness of significant spend;
* The growing importance of IT on business operations; or
* The desire to run IT more like a business.

The current international interest in IT governance provides an opportunity to instil good management practices that enhance the credibility of IT through the delivery of value to the business.

If better control, implemented in harmony with the organisational culture and guided by international benchmarks leads to improved results and outcomes, then these disciplines are easy to internalise.

The innovative approach of the team at Rethink is to establish a sense of pride and professionalism associated with willing compliance to sound business practice. The specific approach needs to be tailored according to need for best results but will invariably require an effective change management effort to produce a sustainable impact.

Governance is more than the methods used to reach decisions or the decision and outcome itself. Without addressing decision-making and input rights in this context, it has little meaning or value. To improve governance one needs to have good governance (control) of an effective and efficient process. Using an analogy of quality control, the quality is inherent to the product or service and can only be controlled at the moment of delivery or use. No amount of other controls will make the quality better. If the process is not capable, controls are meaningless.

If your business has some of some of these symptoms, it may be time to examine your IT governance and its role in the business:

* Too many projects on the go simultaneously;
* Confusion about where for example CoBiT, ITIL, ISO 17799 and many other `solutions` fit in;
* Under-utilised or unused software;
* Risks on projects that don`t deliver on expectation;
* Ineffective service level agreements;
* Difficulty to convince the business that neglecting infrastructure is a high-risk decision;
* Lack of alignment with and input from the business; and
* Lack of a systematic means of determining agreed priorities

Governance is neither simplistic nor homogenous and this is also true within the IT domain. The requirements of those deciding strategy or architecture are different from those who make decisions regarding portfolio management and yet again different from those that manage the infrastructure.

If any perspective is isolated it will drive different and conflicting IT choices. The creative tension arising from simultaneous interplay of all three perspectives serves a useful purpose to help align IT with the business in an agile and flexible manner.

Modern IT governance replaces structured functions with a combination of processes and controls to allow for flexibility and innovation. Organisations have learned by experience that procedure manuals have little use.

IT governance is applicable to all controls of the process that represents the IT value chain of the business enabled by technology.

Speak to us about our framework, approach, measuring and improving IT governance. We can quickly establish where you are and what is required to address the major opportunities for improvement. We also have a holistic approach that serves to unify the governance and process dimensions to provide you with a clear roadmap.