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Sarbanes Oxley : Governance : Thought Leader
10 Signs Your IT Governance Program is Failing You
By
James Rogers
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James Rogers
Chief Marketing Officer
Troux Corporation
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Good IT governance is a required ingredient for any organization or company to succeed in the 21st century. It provides the mechanism by which the executive team can capture the appropriate information and then leverage that information to plan, manage and verify decision making, which accomplishes the act of transforming the business.
Without it, a company stumbles over itself and becomes grossly inefficient as it strives to maintain its position as an industry leader or keep up with the competition.
1. The inability to align IT execution to the business strategy
This is probably the most important symptom of a lack of IT Governance. Without an understanding of your IT ecosystem, you don't know what it is going to take to align and to implement IT to execute your business strategies. In essence, you don't know what you have or what you don't have. So you can't effectively incorporate IT into your strategic planning. This frequently results in organizations that approve projects that, from all outward appearance, are not associated with any business strategy. Organizational clout, supposedly self-funding business cases, and compartmentalized decision processes drive these behaviors. If you cannot easily identify the strategy supporting the funding decision, then there probably isn't one.
2. Limited visibility to make informed decisions
You don't have any visibility into the IT infrastructure and processes. The main objective here is to understand the interrelatedness of the assets. What happens is you build this gigantic investment over several years using different technologies. It's a very complex IT ecosystem. This symptom has been exacerbated in recent years by all the mergers and acquisitions. They have added to the complexity of the ecosystem because many of the systems were inherited. You end up with duplicative processes. Typically, in those organizations, there is no comprehensive view of that IT ecosystem, which is necessary to make any kind of informed decision about what can be accomplished.
3. Project overages
Another very common symptom, which you'll hear the PPM vendors talk a lot about, is project overages. When you create new, important strategic projects, but you don't have a comprehensive understanding of the current state, the desired state, or the interrelationships of the people that are involved in managing that project, you are going to run into problems. You are going to run into unforeseen issues, which inevitably cause project overages.
4. Zero traceability and accountability
Nothing frustrates executives more than poor traceability and accountability. When changes occur that cause unplanned downtime or other problems, and no one understands who did it, how it happened, or why it happened, then odds are high that it will happen again. It may not even be a change triggered by an individual. To complicate matters even more, some of the new "smart" systems make automatic changes based on configuration rules that are sometimes not traceable. For example some of the new smart network devices or relational databases can make automatic "performance improvement" changes that may unfortunately have an adverse effect upon other systems or applications within the enterprise. Without the traceability and accountability of knowing and governing what is being introduced or changed within the various silos of operations, the Enterprise is ill equipped to identify what when wrong when systems begin to fail or performance declines.
The resulting cross functional sleuthing to discover what actually caused the problems can be time consuming and labor intensive, ultimately leading to a costly impact to the business. If you haven't developed a mechanism that models your environment and all the dependencies and interrelatedness, and installed processes and standards to manage that environment, then you are not going to have any kind of traceability or accountability at the time of occurrence, historically, or for testing future impact scenarios. With an implemented IT Governance solution, an organization has a much better chance of implementing corporate standards and planning and managing to those standards on an ongoing basis, which fundamentally provides a better process of maintaining traceability and accountability for the organization.
5. Lack of identification of costs
This is really about per unit costs. Most organizations can identify the individual cost of an asset. But they can't understand the cost of an asset as it relates within the organization with all its interrelatedness and interdependencies. So yes, they can identify that a printer costs so much, but they can't identify what organizations that printer serves. What are the maintenances costs? What critical business applications are using that printer? In many cases, they don't have a mechanism to understand holistically all the costs associated with those related assets.
6. Inefficiencies in operations
A lot of analysts today are talking about opportunities for savings in organizations through consolidation of servers or applications. In many cases there are significant savings to be found in simply understanding what an organization has bought, what has been implemented and what is redundant. There are significant savings in rationalization of Vendors, Servers, Applications, etc. in general. Secondly, there are opportunities in future savings and efficiencies in transition planning, retirement, consolidation, what if analysis, and capacity planning that fundamentally allow an organization to transform the business over time. Organizations with complete IT Governance approaches are able to demonstrate the business contribution of both ongoing and existing IT investments in the form of business improvement metrics.
7. The IT organization is constantly in "react" mode
This symptom captures the essence of an organization that operates without strategic headlights. Day to day lives are consumed implementing the current set of "hot" projects. While some may say "what's wrong with that? Everyone is focused on what matters" the situation is not healthy for IT nor for the business. With focus on the short term, and without adequate time to plan, each new solution is at risk for becoming another stovepipe. Increasingly, more time is spent trying to make each new solution "fit in" than on the solution itself. Heroic acts yield short-term quick fixes which accumulate and produce a complex, unstable, inefficient and costly environment. Eventually, delivery times lengthen, further feeding a vicious cycle.
8. Exposure to regulatory or compliance standards
In many cases, a company that lacks good IT Governance is flying blind when it comes to things like Sarbanes-Oxley. The ironic thing is that many of these regulatory initiatives that have been implemented recently are about an organization being able to demonstrate that organizational activities are managed, controlled and audited. If IT Governance is missing, it is going to be very difficult to demonstrate and comply with these regulations.
9. "Religious Wars" over technology choice and design decisions
Nothing is more unproductive and potentially damaging to an organization than the never-ending "religious wars." Duplicative technology research, vendor influence and biases, and personal agendas all feed this phenomenon and are a reflection of a lack of control through IT Governance. Not only are these battles a waste of resources, there is a high risk of damaging morale. Even more ironic is that these battles are typically over irrelevant issues.
10. Applications and infrastructure portfolios expand without bound
Every IT leader should regularly monitor the size and complexity of their IT infrastructure and application portfolios. Unless the business has undergone significant change in strategy or direction, such as expansion into a new market, the enterprise portfolios should be relatively stable. It is common to see organizations that have no defined management mechanism to identify an "end of life" technology or optimize application portfolios. The increasing complexity adds overhead costs, while also increasing risk to project delivery schedules.
The bottom line is that to solve these kinds of problems, you have to have a comprehensive platform with core components that address the lack of visibility, as well as provide a comprehensive view of your assets and their interrelatedness.
The IT Governance platform must be tied to the Enterprise Architecture plan. EA gives you the ability to model the current state and the desired state, and ultimately transforms your business to the desired state.
James Rogers
Chief Marketing Officer
Troux Corporation
James joins Troux Technologies from Serena Software, a global provider of Application Lifecycle management software, where he was Vice President of Product Marketing responsible for worldwide product marketing, product management and technical marketing. An industry veteran with more than a decade of marketing and engineering experience, James will lead Troux Technologies' worldwide marketing efforts in the IT Governance market.
Prior to Serena, James held a similar position for Merant Software as Vice President of Product Marketing and has held several leadership positions with Remedy Software.
James also worked for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), a 130-year-old non-profit organization that regulates the insurance industry. At NAIC, James managed the back-end support team for the internal applications and system support, and also managed the development of regulatory applications for the ins urance industry.
James earned a bachelor's degree in Government with a concentration in International Relations from California State University in Sacramento.
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