Resources: White Papers

On-Demand IT Governance: A Powerful Tool for Enhancing the Strategic Value of IT

Today, IT plays a key role in determining a company's success by leading strategic initiatives and providing technology solutions that help the business gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Leveraging IT successfully to transform the enterprise and create value-added products and services has become a critical business competency.

THE CHALLENGE

However, the value that IT adds to the business depends upon its relationship and alignment with the business and its ability to help the business meet and exceed corporate vision and goals. At times, broken relationships and misalignment can create perceived failures of IT initiatives. In addition, false impressions about the value that IT provides can arise if deadlines are not met and costs are higher than expected. As a result, the CIO continues to be the bridge between IT and the business, facilitating the alignment between IT initiatives and business objectives as well as providing measures of the value that IT brings to the organization.

THE ROLE OF IT GOVERNANCE

Sustaining the current business paradigm and growing new business models can be achieved only with adequate IT Governance, which is the ability to manage and measure both the strategic and tactical direction of IT in alignment with the business. IT Governance is achieved by ensuring that IT delivers against the business' strategy, while also balancing both the sustainment of its operations and the delivery of the new initiatives required to move the business forward. Furthermore, IT Governance is intended to guarantee that IT provides visibility and transparency into the initiatives set forth by the organization.

Often during the effort to establish IT Governance, organizations can get lost trying to implement an overly complex IT Governance strategy. Organizations can tend to create cumbersome metrics and processes that contribute little value to the organization, if they even are adopted at all. Instead, organizations should take a straightforward approach to create the visibility and balance that are the objectives of IT Governance.

IMPLEMENTING IT GOVERNANCE

Implementing IT Governance may seem daunting, but with a streamlined and focused approach, establishing a strong foundation for IT Governance in a short timeframe is attainable. The most successful IT Governance implementations focus on key business drivers that support a targeted and optimized IT initiative. These are: Strategy and Alignment, Sustaining Operations, Strategic Initiatives, and Measuring IT Performance.

Strategy & Alignment:

Strategy and alignment are critical to IT Governance and critical to building the relationship between IT and other business units. An effective IT organization should drive business alignment by:

• Ensuring that IT strategy is driven by business strategy.
• Ensuring that IT delivers against the strategy. This means delivering initiatives on time, on budget, with appropriate functionality, including the intended benefits.
• Balancing investments between systems that support the current enterprise, and those that transform the enterprise.
• Optimizing resource usage across sustaining applications in the enterprise and driving strategic initiatives.

Companies that align their IT objectives with the overall business strategy will drive better business value from IT and ensure that IT is focused on delivering common business goals. Better business value comes from both investing in the highest return projects as well as delaying, combining, or dropping projects (and the required investment in them) that are not aligned with business strategy.

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