Improve IT Organizational Maturity by Developing a Participative, Proactive, and Cohesive Governance Model

Governance is like steer-wheel, to ensure enterprise running in the right direction and well head to the destination.

With exponential growth of information and emerging disruptive technologies, IT brings both opportunities and risks in businesses today. It’s a natural evolution as most business initiatives involves IT, IT possesses the companies both widest breadth of view and deep insight and become the competitive advantage of the business. In reality, the majority of organizations still get stuck at the lower level of maturity, CIOs are at the right position to practice governance discipline with in-depth knowledge, and help to develop a governance model that’s participative, proactive, and cohesive for improving IT organizational maturity.

IT governance is a vector of quality, for both the maturity of business process and outcome: IT oversees and supports almost all business processes. Thus, IT leaders are in a unique position to address business complexity and improve organizational effectiveness, quality, and efficiency. IT has to follow a model that businesses understand. IT governance enforcement starting with understanding business as a dynamic complex and adaptive system, is the starting point.

Governance, risk, and compliance are not a single business process, but a collection of business processes with some technique governance mechanisms. Contemporary businesses are complex, there is descriptive complexity (IT itself), nonlinearity complexity (digital disruption) or emergent complexity (hyper-connectivity, hyper-competition, interdependence, etc.) Eventually, as the company grows, so will the need for standard policies and procedures.

Effective IT governance is not just about covering risk management, but also about ensuring alignment with the corporate objectives, policies, and procedures for how IT works, and measuring the value returned to the business, setting good principles or right policies to enforce quality, manage organizational complexities, and create an environment to harness accountability and bring up fruitful business results.

Effective IT governance has innovation built in to harness innovation: IT shouldn’t work in isolation and must get the backing from the business. IT is always striving to improve its value to the business. CIOs need to concentrate on the business information requirements that support company growth. They must continuously educate C-Levels that the IT organization is an innovation engine and value creation center. They need to know how to play a bridge between what businesses understand and what technology understands, and make sure the two worlds meet to ensure an optimal performing business.

IT governance and risk management are critical in enabling how IT becomes a competitive advantage for supporting business goals and catalyzing change.Those organizations that feel stifled by governance may not have matured beyond operational risk and control. Highly effective IT governance will have incorporated a process for change and innovation. This should allow for IT innovation to excel within the constraints of the hierarchy of the organization.

IT governance model needs to be participative, proactive, and cohesive: How good governance, like budgets, can flex to changing business needs, when emerging digital technologies become a business catalyst, governance has to move at the same pace. 

In reality though, IT struggles at the table for the budget because they have seen as a cost center and not a valued contributor. In many IT organizations, spending on IT maintenance and mandatory changes for legal and compliance reasons will remain stubbornly high. An essential question for IT leaders is whether their IT budgeting matches the level of tech innovation they expect. 

To improve IT organizational maturity, IT governance needs to be participative and proactive. You can't ask for budgeting flexibility if IT operations and project delivery aren’t flexible. You can’t have a nimble governance and resource allocation process with a governance team that meets twice a year. All IT spending must be rationalized against the business benefits. IT governance is also converging with corporate governance. Data/IT governance is an integral component of business governance.

Governance is like steer-wheel, to ensure enterprise running in the right direction and well head to the destination. A CIO owns delivery of one of any organization's key assets - its information.IT Governance as a critical responsibility and a subset of Corporate Governance, needs to focus on the value that a well-governed business can bring to their strategic stance so that the end game - the best benefit for the enterprise is achieved effortlessly.

Posted in: GRC,IT Transformation