governance

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]

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.

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.

In my up-coming book Basic Service Management, 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.