Trends: IT Governance

By Luis Avendaño

What is IT Governance? In a very short time this term has been applied to a wide variety of concepts such as compatibility, audits, usage policies, decision making, standards, portfolios, management, among others. That is to say, it has become a concept that is brought up in every situation where the technology business and management are related.

First and foremost, let’s clear up the meaning of the term. According to Gartner, “IT governance establishes authority and management for the decision making process, so that the desired technology usage behaviors are promoted and/or encouraged”. In layman’s terms, it refers to the management of leadership, organizational structures and processes to ensure that IT maintains and broadens the goals and strategies of the company.

It’s not possible to deploy an IT governance strategy overnight; it’s necessary to consider a series of factors that could determine its success. Some of those are: a clear understanding of the business strategy, knowledge of the technological platform, planning in order to deploy a new model, project portfolio management, applications and infrastructure, and lastly, availability of technological resources to support the management of the IT business.

Many might ask what we’re doing to follow this trend. DBAccess is currently working on two projects directly aligned with the concept of IT governance. One of them is ETS. Work is ongoing on a roadmap for that project in 2005, with goals such as the quest to relate the information that the system currently handles with the business and decision making processes. Is this not IT governance? We are following the trend by aligning business needs with the management of technological resources.

Another one of the projects currently ongoing is the evaluation of a series of tools that can be classified as Application Mapping Tools.Their main goal is to form a map of relationships between applications and infrastructure, and then with the business processes, thus making it possible to anticipate the impact that a change in business processes could have on the technological platform and vice-versa; how a change on an application or infrastructure level can affect the platform and business processes. Just like for ETS, this kind of tool aims to provide executives with some level of visibility about the business platform and how it supports the business processes.

In closing, I leave you with a phrase I ran across in a 2005 ETS roadmap presentation which I believe relates closely with this article: “Organiza Organizations must have a complete view of their IT assets and how they work together to serve the business, or waste dollars on overbuilding, troubleshooting and redundant activity” -- METAGROUP.