IT Governance: prevention and cure

Posted October 26, 2011 at 1:50 pm by Marijke Kasius in Cloud Computing, General, Infrastructure.

It’s impossible to imagine your organization without IT. Indeed: 2010 figures from CBS (Statistics Netherlands) show 63% of businesses declare to be dependent on IT. In most cases, IT is there to strongly support business processes, think for example of online accountancy systems, inventory and/or order modules, learning environments and of course corporate websites with web shops. We, as an IT organization, obviously completely depend on IT, but basically the same goes for every company.

With increasing IT dependency, the call for and importance of proper IT Governance grows. A well-defined IT Governance system ensures proper decision-making and proper risk assessment. It also ensures proper division of tasks and responsibilities, proper course setting, and continuous monitoring of different segments. IT reporting will continually keep you up to date on the state of your IT organization. This doesn’t prevent things from ever going wrong, but when they do, it shows you what to do. What are the chances something goes wrong, and if it does, what is the impact? What is the backup plan and who is responsible at that moment?

Imagine Blackberry’s failure hit your organization. What impact would that have? And is your business mobile network set up in such a way you can switch providers whenever you like? How replaceable are IT components in your organization? From experience we know there are plenty of technical possibilities to optimally cover IT, including redundancy, other or extra back-up options, cloud solutions, better defined SLAs and monitoring.

IT Governance in organizations is often underestimated. Think of all the times companies only focussed on sales or on other non IT related issues, and the times they failed to assess risks of outdated or badly implemented environments, resulting in serious problems. After all, the shoemaker’s children are often shoeless.

A failing IT component within your organization does not only affect your business, but can also damage your organization’s image. With the arrival of social media, news travels very fast. Blackberry knows a thing or two about that. Here’s a random selection of one minute of English tweets with hashtag #bb:

• #bb #blackberry Steve Jobs still working his magic from above. #iPhonewinseverytime
• And iPhone users everywhere smile smugly and search for the “I Told You So” app… #blackberry #BB’s
• Any idea when this whole #BB service failure is going to end? Pfff

Another lesson we can learn from Blackberry’s problems is that of communication. It took Blackberry days before they came up with a (very vague) response. Incidentally, comparable to BP last year. No communication is also communication. It makes people insecure, they will interpret and fill in what they think is going on. Lack of communication makes people suspicious. This is always so, not just in this Blackberry situation. If top layers of an organization fail to deliver clear communication, employees will start to wonder what is going on and speculate. Even if nothing is wrong.

Make sure you are in control, especially where IT is concerned. If your internal IT Governance is properly organized, you have higher awareness of risks and this does not only imply less chance of failure, but also immediate action if it does occur.