Reccan - IT Management - IT Governance - Best Practise Guidelines

In recent years IT governance has become more widely recognised as the term that covers the cooperation required between business and IT managers to successfully drive the business exploitation of IT. IT governance is seen as the organisational structure, management disciplines and processes needed to ensure that IT investment delivers real business productivity.

In the following paragraphs we explore various aspects of IT governance to help you determine if a renewed focus on IT governance would benefit your organisation.

Available best practice advice on IT governance tends to focus on how to coordinate business/IT management activity or interprets IT governance as an IT risk and control concern. All these guidelines also acknowledge that business priorities are used to define IT exploitation objectives. At Reccan we see that both of these management perspectives are valid and complementary.

IT governance contributes to business success by focusing on how direction setting and responsibility is shared between the business and IT management. The contribution to business success is delivered through a set of management activities that can be broadly classified as:

Organisation - the structures for communication between business and IT authorities required for decision making and the influence that is needed to establish and progress the business priorities for IT.
Business and IT management domains - where accountability for activities associated with the exploitation are owned and implemented.
Measurement and reporting - the requirement to assess the business contribution of IT and the effectiveness in maintaining the business IT capability.

IT governance therefore establishes the structure for coordination of business/IT objectives, it also identifies where business/IT management commitments are required and sets the objectives and performance measures needed to stay focused on these objectives.

The diagram below illustrates this ongoing commitment to business/IT allignment

The underlying challenge for IT Governance is to establish the coordinated commitment from the business and IT stakeholders. Businesses generally optimize work efficiency through the division of responsibility and business focus. Working within divisional or business unit structures business managers will often have different views on the priorities and requirements for IT. The distribution of budgets, conflicting objectives and internal politics all add to the challenge of establishing a commitment to IT as illustrated below.

The structure and culture of an organisation will influence how these dimensions of IT governance are blended together. For example, organisations requiring a high degree of business coordination will generally be more centrally managed and risk/control focused but more federal businesses that value business unit autonomy would tend to put more emphasis on coordinating IT initiatives.

The role of IT Governance is to ensure effective and productive cooperation from all IT stakeholders.

A useful way to view the role of IT Governance is to take a systems thinking perspective. Systems thinking is a discipline that promotes a shift of mind from a linear cause and effect or snapshot to seeing interrelationships and a process of change. This mindset shift is exactly what IT governance needs to promote and use.

The systems thinking view of IT Governance is illustrated below. The diagram shows the ongoing process of matching IT commitment to the business needs.

This diagram helps to highlight that the most important aspect of IT governance is to maintain a productive process that will ensure IT commitments are aligned with business priorities. It is essential that all interested parties are involved in order to achieve commitment to the actions required and acceptance of any compromise that needs to be made. This systems thinking perspective is central to the Reccan IT governance implementation framework (see best practice IT governance).