IT Governance - The Community Perspectives

Not so long time ago a great discussion was started by Tru DO KHAC in the IT Governance group in LinkedIn.

Its name said "CHALLENGE: Describe "IT governance" in no more than a 160 characters SMS message (including spaces, punctuations and carriage returns)". And you will find almost a hundred reactions there by now.

Here I will share with you my 10 favorite definitions and make a brief analysis of the challenge results.

My ten personal favorites (not necessarily in the order of mentioning):

• IT Governance is aligning IT processes and solutions with the organization's strategic priorities and objectives to achieve valuable business outcomes. (Jenny Steinmetz)


• The leadership and organisational structures and processes that ensure that IT sustains and extents the organisation's strategies and objectives. (ITGI 2003, "Board Briefing on IT Governance, 2nd Edition" cited by Patrick Soenenрер)


• IT Governance is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. (Wikipedia cited by Andrew N Dowden)


• IT Governance: Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT. (from Weill&Ross cited by Igor Knezevic)


• IT Governance is the processes and relationships that lead to reasoned decision-making to ensure maximum value is realized from investment in technology. (Steve Romero)


• IT Governance is evaluating IT change against IT Policies and Standards to ensure alignment with the IT Strategy, or when this is not possible or desirable that the discrepancy is identified, quantified and managed going forward. (Kevin L. Smith's)


• IT Governance is an activity of making longterm decisions that concern all key aspects of using IT in the organization. (Mikhail Zyryanov)


• IT Governance is a management framework to deliver efficient and effective IT services which are aligned to core business plans and strategy. (Pete Linforth)


• It is a framework for implementing processes that enable business & IT to align themselves with corporate strategies using standards, approvals and metrics. (Maryellen Evans)


• IT Governance is how IT investments are managed in terms of cost, risk and value to the organisation. (Laurence Lock Lee)

My own contributed definition of IT Governance was "An umbrella encompassing roles, rules and mechanisms at strategic level to enable IT efficiently support the goals and vision of your organization."

Looking at all the variety of viewpoints it's difficult to gather them all under one definition. That is why I believe that IT Governance is rather an umbrella-term than something that can be briefly and precisely defined.

In general all definitions given in the discussion can be divided into six large groups:

• Accountabilities - those definitions talking about control, rules, compliance, and decision rights. Arguably most of these definitions are inspired by the research of P.Weill and J.Ross

keywords: rights, accountabilities, control, rules, decisions, direct, enforce, decisions, ownership

example: "Ernest Rosello: The assignment of decision-making rights and accountabilities regarding behavior in the desirable use of IT"

• BITA (Business-IT Alignment) - the definitions saying about alignment in one or another way - some definitions directly involved the word "alignment" or "Business-IT Alignment"; others mentioned "joined effort" or "support of business goals"

keywords: alignment, enable business, support of business goals, joined effort

example: "Jenny Steinmetz: IT Governance is aligning IT processes and solutions with the organization's strategic priorities and objectives to achieve valuable business outcomes."

• Framework - IT Governance is defined as a framework of principles, practices, standards or other elements; or "framework" is a substantial element of the definition.

keywords: framework, structure, set, umbrella

example: "Pete Linforth: IT Governance is a management framework to deliver efficient and effective IT services which are aligned to core business plans and strategy."

• List - here IT Governance is defined as a sum of its elements. I placed the definitions containing more than 3 elements into this group.

example: "Safdar: IT Governance is relationship of Processes, Structuring and Accountabilities optimized to address Strategic Alignemnt , Value Delivery ,Risk mgmt , Performamnce Mgmt and Resource Mgmt."

• Financial/investments perspective - in these definitions the financial component was explicitly mentioned or was made the focal point of the definition

keywords: investments, money, profit, total cost of ownership, shareholder value

example: "Laurence Lock Lee: IT Governance is how IT investments are managed in terms of cost, risk and value to the organisation."

• Other - all other definitions not falling under any of the previous categories.

example: "Harrell Van Norman: IT Governance is a good way to make sure your are doing the right thing"

Every definition could fall under more than one category. In total at the moment of the analysis there were 97 comments including 16 not providing any definition.

If you are interested in grouped definitions in xls format, you can download the file here.

So, even though the concept is relatively vague and definitions say sometimes about absolutely different things, we can notice the typical line and common understanding which unites the community and allows a professional to say if he or she belongs there.

In a parallel thread in the same group a discussion was started by Miguel Garcia-Menendez about the proper name for the "IT Governance" concept.

It did not get as much attention as the Challenge thread. But the commentors agreed that at least "IT" should not take the first place in the name. The proposed names included:

• Business Governance of IT
• Enterprise Governance of IT
• Corporate Governance of IT

However, just like I discussed whether "Business & IT Alignment" is a proper term, I believe that it is too late to think of a new name. Even though the name "IT Governance" puts too much focus on IT, it is already too much established and has too strong position and recognition as a term to be changed.

In the future I plan to make an overview of how the topic of IT Governance is covered by blogs, by scientific publications, by existing standards and practices. If you have any information on that or have any suggestions, I will be glad to read from you.

Picture source: iStockPhoto