Transcript: IT governance

Description: IT execs are adopting best practices and software applications to optimize IT governance to gain control, roll out compliance initiatives and ultimately, align IT back to the business.

Hi, thanks for joining me. My name is Christopher Lochead and I'm the chief marketing officer at Mercury and today we're going to talk about what Gartner calls one of the top five issues, which is IT governance.

Now the question is, why is IT governance such a hot issue today? Well, it really comes down to three critical things. The first one is, how do we get better control over IT? IT plays a seminal role in automating all of the critical functions of a business today and getting return and making sure that IT's delivering business value is critical.

The second issue is, our compliance has emerged as a huge issue around the world, especially with new regulations coming from the government like Sarbanes-Oxley. There is a straight line between the chairman's office and the CIO's office because to comply with something like SOX, you've got to modify business processes. And today, about 90% of key business processes, especially financial ones, are automated in software. So compliance initiatives by default become IT initiatives.

And the last is this notion of alignment. How do we align the goals, the resources, and ultimately the results of IT with what the business is trying to achieve and that's really what IT governance is about. So how does this work? You've got the business up here and the business makes strategic request of IT to do things and that creates demand on IT resources. So for example, the VP of sales shows up in the CIO's office and says, "We want to reach a broader market and we want to sell more of our product on the Internet that creates demand for new applications on the Internet to sell stuff." The CFO shows up in the CIO's office and says, "We need to modify, for example, our SAP systems to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, more demand on IT."

The next is, we need to manage the entire portfolio of projects that IT is working on what's called "project and portfolio management" and what this is about is specifically managing the people, the priorities, the projects, and the processes-- all the Ps within IT and doing it in a broad way. If you have these two things, first of all, you have visibility in everything you've been asked to do and everything you're currently doing. From there, the CIO can sit down witha line of business executive and make strategic trade-offs and what the real priorities are and do "what-if" analysis. So for example, if we do this new Sarbanes-Oxley initiative, what is the impact going to be on, let's say for example, CRM rollout that we're currently working on? The last phase of this is called "change management," which is how do we govern the process by which new IT services, new applications are rolled out into production? Who signs off on it? Who agrees that the project is done? Has business analysis done to make sure that what we ask for in demand is actually what we're going to get in change management, so that ultimately when new IT applications and services get rolled out, we deliver that all important business value. So leading IT executives are adopting best practices and software applications to optimize IT governance to gain the control, to roll out compliance initiative, and ultimately to align IT back to the business.

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