From your quotes, you are

JoePearson — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:12:02 +0000

From your quotes, you are 100% right. Those quotes talk about management.

One of the points of governance is that it's separate from management - it checks up on management - it governs it. The governors, sorry, the "governance roles", must not have any vested interest in approving mgt decisions because it makes themselves look good: they must not be the managers: they must be non-executive. (The importance of non-executive directors at board level and the splitting of chairman and CEO roles is the same kind of thing; ignoring it gives us Enron. [My bid for oversimplification of the month, but I'm still right.])

Is it perhaps the case that true governance simply isn't happening?* - Thereby leaving the term free for those trying to advise the managers (that includes me) to use and abuse? We vendors, trainers, consultants and bloggers are less likely to get the attention and the money of the true non-executive corporate governors, so let's go for the managers.

Having an International Standard won't by itself stop this dilution of the term; having CEOs and CIOs afraid of governance will.

* (Why might IT governance not be happening - as in, not going down to an effective level? My experience of SOX and COBIT governance efforts suggests that they all have a tendency to focus on very few controls, and even then to drop some of them when the resistance shows up. And in the case of SOX, to focus only on the ability to produce financial reports. If corporate governance is so hard, it doesn't bode well for the value of IT governance.)

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "ISO38500 may be too late; the word &quot;governance&quot; is rapidly equalling &quot;management&quot;"

From your quotes, you are

The IT Skeptic - Comments for "ISO38500 may be too late; the word "governance" is rapidly equalling "management""