IT Governance

What is IT Governance?

IT Governance refers to putting together structures around how organizations align IT strategy with business strategy to ensure that they stay on track to achieve their organizational objectives, in addition to implementing ways by which IT performance can be measured and optimized. IT Governance is a subset discipline of corporate governance that ensures all stakeholders interests are taken into account and that processes provide measurable results.

Is it for me?

Every organization irrespective of its size and type needs a way to ensure that its IT is aligned with business. Organizations here range from small organizations to multi nationals and with varied domain of business expertise. The level of granularity and sophistication of IT Governance may vary according to size, industry and applicable regulations.

What are the drivers for implementing IT Governance and its business case?

Following are a few organizational pain areas which can be addressed using IT Governance solutions:

• Regulatory compliance
• Confrontation with reduced budgets and increased expectation
• Misalignment between business activities, IT activities and its limited connection to business and strategic objectives
• Prioritization of initiatives, resources and assets across the project portfolio
• Productivity goals are not met
• Reducing costs while delivering on-time, on-budget, and on-quality
• No visibility into projects for management and stakeholders to track key performance and quality parameters
• Absence of well defined standard processes and ad hoc approach to process compliance

What are the some key areas of IT Governance?

• Portfolio Management - Scenario comparisons, what-if analysis, portfolio lifecycle
• Program/ Project Management - Issue/ Risk/ Scope change management, project processes, work plan
• Performance Measures - Balance score cards, KPI metrics, project health indicators
• Resource Management - Allocation/ De-allocation, managing capacity vs availability
• Financial Management - Budgets, charge backs
• Time Management - time entry, approval process, actuals roll-up
• Deployment Management - Roll-outs, configuration management

What benefits does IT Governance bring in?

PPM enables an organization to enhance execution efficiency, effectiveness and productivity while reducing project failure risks.

• Business-based decision making
• Closer alignment of IT with business
• More predictable project outcomes
• One source of truth for what's being asked of IT
• One system of record for what IT is doing and current status
• One system to merge top-down intent with bottom-up reality to deliver value
• Better IT governance that is compliant with regulatory specifications
• Cost reductions and productivity increases

HP (HP Project and Portfolio Management Center) and CA (CA Clarity) are both of which are 'Leaders' in the Forrester Wave for PPM Tools (Q4-'07) with a strong market presence.

Will my investments in implementing IT Governance pay-off?

Study by Gantry group on PPM customers with average number of IT professional around 1000 shows that:

• Majority (6 of 8) achieved positive ROI in 1st Year
• Delivered $4.8 million ROI after one year
• Recoups 6.5% of annual IT budget after one year from tangible benefits
• Delivered significant efficiency gains in many categories
• Improves the annual average for project timeliness dramatically by 45.2%
• Reduces IT management time spent on project status reporting by 43.2%, reclaiming 3.8 hours of each managers workweek
• Decrease the time to achieve financial sign-off for new IT projects by 20.4%, or 8.4 days