governance

IT: to protect and serve

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2012-06-08 23:16

The motto "to protect and serve" is a good one for IT.

Governors govern

Submitted by skeptic on Mon, 2012-06-04 22:40

I've said it before on this blog a number of times but it bears repeating: governors govern.

Organisations have failed their IT like bad parents

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2012-03-18 20:14

Fed up with the modern failures of IT being all IT's fault, I thought it was time to do something about it. So here is a white paper aimed at educating the business world to their responsibilities for IT. The world has really messed up owning IT (Information Technology), like a bad parent messing up a child's upbringing, letting them develop bad habits. We need to do better. We can do better. We need to do it soon, as modern IT requirements become ever more complex. [The white paper was slightly edited for version 5 in June 2012]

Whining about the IT department

Submitted by skeptic on Thu, 2012-02-16 10:09

If ever there was a classic example of how business people can become spoilt whining brats when it comes to IT services, it is in a recent article in Forbes online. Clearly, organisations have a stupendous amount of work to do to educate their staff in how to be grown-up about IT as a resource (no it is not IT's job to do this):

COBIT 5: muddying governance and management

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2011-07-31 20:48

Execution always falls short of expectation. I'm still pondering my impressions of COBIT5 - more on that later - but one thing is clear: they haven't fully fixed the governance/management thing. [Update: I didn't get this right, see comments below]

How business has failed IT like a bad parent

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2011-02-15 17:09

The world has really screwed up with owning IT, like a bad parent screwing up a child's upbringing and letting them develop bad habits.

How does IT survive with no policy framework?

Submitted by skeptic on Tue, 2010-03-23 12:51

As far as I can tell there is no such thing as a policy framework for IT. ISO38500 bangs on about the need for policies. ITIL and COBIT mention legions of policies. But I can find nothing that gives us a comprehensive list of necessary policies, let alone describes what a policy structure looks like and what the priorities are.

Governance support

Submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2009-12-09 21:34

In my up-coming book Basic Service Management, I am using the term "governance support" to distinguish from governance.

Governance directives as input to ITIL

Submitted by skeptic on Wed, 2009-10-28 05:50

Being a simple soul with only a limited grasp of ITIL, sometimes I'm sure I've missed something obvious. Like when I went looking in the Service Strategy book to find where the overall business plan or organisational strategy informs the service strategy. If IT is your business, if you are an IT service provider company, then I can see SS working. But for an internal service provider, for an IT department, SS reads as if service strategy is developed in isolation from the rest of the organisation, as if we treat the rest of the organisation as a remote customer of services instead of as the same team, from whom we take direction. At what point in SS do we ask the Board? At what point does the corporate executive inject policy? Where do we align with the business strategy? Or did I miss something?

Terminological debasement of governance

Submitted by skeptic on Sun, 2009-06-14 01:27

Two excellent publications recently commented on what I call terminological debasement of the term "governance".

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