governance

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

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?

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

Interest in IT Governance is rising rapidly, but a new ISO standard makes clear that the term is often misused. What we are really seeing is a rise in interest in IT Governance and Assurance. Along with Service Management these will provide the three supports for business-IT alignment, as predicted by the IT Swami.

The word "governance" is in danger of total debasement. ISO38500 may be only half-cooked but that is because it arrived just in time... or perhaps too late.

The IT Skeptic adheres to a purist usage of the word "governance" which aligns closely with the new ISO38500 standard. The word is often used to mean management: running a business unit or function. This is just plain wrong. But somewhere in between is a set of activities in a grey area.

The latest issue of a Spanish IT magazine looks at ICT Governance, and it is available for download in English.

IT Governance standard PRF 29382 "Corporate governance of information technology" has been renumbered as ISO/IEC 38500 (memorise that number) and is currently being published for end of May release, which is excellent news. Perhaps now we can get people to use the word "governance" properly.

Governance is hot. "Governance" is the "in" word right now in IT. It is also a word that is suffering badly from terminological debasement, something the IT Skeptic has railed against on this blog before. Look for more on this in the near future.

I agree with a recent comment about vendors being an essential part of the ITIL community. I have defended their presence and influence before. But we lack the governance to ensure that presence is a healthy one.