INTRODUCTION

In the last chapter, IT governance was defined along with trends and business objectives. Here you will see how specific business elements such as objectives, vision, etc. can be related to Information Technology. After this, the roles and responsibilities of the IT organization can be addressed. The purpose of this chapter is to provide you with guidelines so that you can define the alignment between IT and the organization as well as to see and implement more effective IT governance.

Let s consider IT governance and management in the traditional setting. In the previous chapter, IT was originally seen as a support organization that responded to specific business demands. IT was a reactive organization, much like a public safety organization, such as a fire or police department. IT oversight and governance was typically in the hands of the manager to whom the IT group reported. IT, as such, was often insulated from much of the business since systems work was more time consuming and complex. Once IT supported finance, accounting, payroll, and some operations functions, there was little left over for other work.

Management expectations of IT and systems was fairly limited. If you read the literature of 20 30 years ago, you find that many upper level managers had little understanding of IT. There was only a limited view of how dependent the organization was on systems and technology. In fact, systems was often viewed as a way to perform manual work faster. Thus, the expectation of management was that...