Tony Lock writes interestingly about the Niku Corporation’s recent survey: 6 out of10 major European companies plan to deploy information governance and management solutions over the next two years.
It’s good news that such organizations want to effectively manage and measure IT performance; ensure that IT projects are prioritised in line with business needs; and that IT service delivery should be aligned with business requirements.
But it’s also old news: organizations have wanted to do that since the advent of computing as a key business tool.
The emergence of IT governance is to do with the “who” and the “how” of IT is governed – and at the heart of IT governance is the notion that the board should recognise its accountability around IT and structure itself so that it is able to properly discharge that accountability. And this most emphatically does not require the deployment of IT governance “solutions” – “solutions” have a long history of expensive (albeit fashionable) failure, and IT governance is about moving away from IT industry inspired “solutions” to a goverance framework that provides real IT leadership inside the organization.
Organizations that deploy “IT governance and management solutions” without having first created a board-led IT governance framework and environment will rue the day they allowed it to happen.
