Saturday, January 20, 2007

3. Information on IT Governance



Objectives of IT Governance

The overall objectives of IT governance activities are to understand the issues and the strategic importance of IT, to ensure that the enterprise can keep up with its operations and to establish that it can implement the strategies required to extend its activities into the future. IT governance practices aim at ensuring that expectations for IT are met, IT's performance is measured, its resources are managed and its risks are mitigated.
The Purpose of IT governance

Basically, there are four reasons for having IT governance. The purpose of IT governance is to direct IT endeavors, to ensure that IT's performance meets the following objectives:

  • For IT to be aligned with the enterprise and realize the promised benefits
  • For IT to enable the enterprise by exploiting opportunities and maximizing benefits
  • For IT resources to be used correctly
  • For IT-related risks to be managed appropriately


Who Is Involved in IT Governance?

  • Team leaders report to and receive direction from their managers;
  • Managers report up to the executive;
  • The executive reports to the board of directors.

This reporting process includes descriptions of any activities that show signs of deviating from targeted objectives. Each layer, when reporting these deviations, should include recommendations for action that must be authorized by the governing level above. Clearly the effectiveness of this layered approach depends on successful cascading of strategy and goals down into the organization.

Stakeholders, play a part in IT governance. At the heart of the governance responsibilities of setting strategy, managing risks, allocating resources, delivering value and measuring performance, are the stakeholder values, which drive the enterprise and IT strategy.
Sustaining the current business and growing into new business models are certainly stakeholder expectations and can be achieved only with adequate governance of the enterprise's IT infrastructure.



Process of IT Governance




  1. The IT governance process begins with setting objectives for the enterprise's IT, providing the initial direction.

  2. After that, a continuous loop is established: performance is measured and compared to objectives, creating a redirection of activities where necessary and change of objectives where appropriate.

  3. While objectives are primarily the responsibility of the board and performance measures that of management, it is also shown that they should be developed in concert so that the objectives are measurable represent the objectives correctly.


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home