Charting a Course to Achieving World-class IT Governance, One Step at a Time

Fred Gattelaro, Pacific Edge   Today’s Top Stories   or  Other Management Stories  

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November 28, 2005 (Computerworld) -- Governance has become a critical element of effective IT management. While it's clear that well-defined practices and mature processes deliver many benefits to an IT organization, it's less clear how an organization achieves mature IT governance processes. Without a well-defined IT governance implementation plan, many organizations become overwhelmed by the complexity of implementing new IT governance practices, tools and processes. The implementation project slows down, results are slow to materialize, and participants may become frustrated and discouraged with the lack of progress. Ultimately, many governance initiatives fail.
There is another way to approach an IT governance project, however. By taking a phased approach, organizations can tackle small steps successively -- and far more successfully. Within each phase, the IT organization can choose to focus on specific goals that will deliver the highest value for the least amount of effort, while moving the organization further along the path to mature IT governance processes.
Creating Visibility -- First Understand What Exists
A common mistake that many organizations make is trying to quickly introduce new procedures or assess the return on investment of proposed IT initiatives without an accurate understanding of how existing projects in the IT portfolio contribute to enterprise goals. For example, many companies have no way to align their IT investments with the enterprise's overall business strategy. Therefore, as demands from various business units increase, the inability to prioritize IT investments results in intense competition for resources and proliferation of projects within the application portfolio that overlap or become redundant. Valuable IT resources become overburdened and can't be used most effectively, and soon the majority of IT resource capacity is consumed by work that simply keeps the lights on instead of advancing the company toward its strategic goals.
By gaining visibility into the current mix of IT projects and applications, IT organizations can examine their portfolios and begin to prioritize projects by importance. A phased approach that uses a simple modeling framework can help the IT organization separate project work from nonproject work and gain information about each project that will enable projects to be aligned with business strategy.
Gaining visibility is a baseline level of IT governance maturity. By proceeding through a modeling framework, the IT organization should be able to achieve milestones that lay the groundwork for being able to address resource supply and demand mismatches. With visibility into the existing project portfolio, the organization can:

• Eliminate duplicate and nonstrategic initiatives.


• Model and view the effect of changes in the portfolio.


• Gain data required for measuring capacity and prioritizing projects.


• Identify areas where resources are overallocated or underutilized.


• Increase the availability of resources for strategic initiatives.

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