IT Performance Improvement Practice
Methodology
By definition, IT Governance idealizes that all members of an organization should share both the planning of, and responsibility for, IT systems. Many procedural, compliance driven frameworks have been developed including the major frameworks of ITIL, ISO, COBIT, PRINCE2, PMBOK, CMMI, Six Sigma, BASEL II and COSO.
DCG experience recognizes that people and culture are the primary drivers of good governance and that regardless of the specific framework being implemented simple principles, when applied, seem to work best. These include:
“Steve Bozzo, the CIO at online florist 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., of Carle Place, NY, says he learned that lesson the hard way. Early in his 30-year IT career, he would brag to his bosses that the systems he was responsible for were up 99.9% of the time. “They’d say, ‘But Steve, they were down when we needed them most,’” he says.
That taught Mr. Bozzo that he needed to focus on the business impact of technology and not the technology itself. For example, he didn’t describe to his company’s executives a recent region wide telephone outage that caused customer calls to get dropped as a one-minute disruption, which was the amount of time that the systems were down. He called it a 10-minute outage, which is how long it took for the customer-service representatives to log back into their systems and reconnect with customers.
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- Provide transparency and education.
- Keep the number of decision-making structures small.
- Get senior management involved in major IT decisions.
- Build in overlapping responsibilities for IT decisions.
- Design exception processes into governance processes.
Change governance only when desirable behaviors change.