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IT Governance with Digité Enterprise

Prabhas Sinha IT Governance has never been so prominent until 21st century ushered in with scores of
Product Marketing Manager
Derek Scoble companies undergoing litmus test of their financial reporting, subsequent introduction of
VP - IT Governance Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 and the Section 404 mandating them to uncover their intricate and
Digité Inc. deeply buried accounting practices and thereby Corporations padding up for a stricter
82 Pioneer Way
Mountain View, CA governance code. The business case and need for IT Governance is convincing. Implementing
effective and efficient enterprise IT Governance is problematic, multidimensional, and resource
intensive. Trouble areas include culture, environment, geography, organizational control, cost,
and commitment to name just a few. Add in the time required to implement real change and the
systems to manage the transition and desired end state and we have quite a challenge.

So what is IT Governance? It is about visibility, accountability and making IT decisions, which works
in tandem with IT Management that is about implementing various IT decisions. IT Governance
keeps together the IT strategies and Business strategies and converts IT maxims into strategic
actions, which is critical for any CIO. This means that a business has to ensure compliance
enforcement and it has to percolate throughout the organization where actions taken by every
individual and group throughout an organization has to be consistent with the business goals. Real
governance recognizes solid initiative business cases fulfilling strategic plans to be built on approved
enterprise architectures using standard procurement processes. These initiatives support vendor
and contract management controls overlaying recognized system development lifecycles with
integrated project management and quality programs. These initiatives factor in skilled resource
management and the enterprise business cycle driven by understanding business processes and
organizational capacity. Underlying all the above is the auditing process that verifies that original
assumptions and execution are realized according to plan especially if regulatory compliance is an
issue. A robust communication mechanism must disseminate the compliance requirements, policies
and procedures, reporting parameters and retain the electronic audit trails. On the lines of Federal
Sentencing Guidelines (established by United States Sentencing Commission), corporate
governance initiatives have started embracing communication, empowerment, enforcement,
monitoring, policies and procedures to properly align, integrate, manage, and monitor the
governance.

Overall the emphasis is on the operational excellence of IT that should have impact on an
organization's Customers, Capital, Resources and Cycle Time. The 5 must-have benefits of IT
Governance are:

1. Visibility into an integrated strategy portfolio across all IT investments.

2. Financial metrics showing the return on IT investment i.e., costs that it has avoided or
reduced and possible revenues it will attract.
3. Strong Program management, reporting and audits exhibiting IT process improvements.
4. Rigorous project execution, measurement, and early warnings of risks.
5. Effective labor and non-labor resource management.

If enterprise IT Governance is ever to mean something more than high-level project abstractions
presented in executive dashboards we must recognize that true governance is built on structured
level components that make the results believable or not. These 5 elements of IT Governance
clearly put emphasis on the IT EXECUTION layer within any organization. “Running IT Like
Business” and “Business Alignment of IT” are two sides of the same coin. The best laid-out plans
flounder without well-executed implementation. Looking through the actual execution,
organizations will cut their IT cost and risks by coordinating their Software Development Life

www.digite.com 1 Copyright 2005 Digité, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Cycle processes with Project Management and aligning their strategies for operations,
collaboration and application delivery.

Digité Enterprise offers a unique combination of PPM, SDLC, and BPM with seamlessly weaved
Collaboration technologies that caters to the mentioned 5 must-haves of IT Governance:
i) PPM: Project Portfolio Management (PPM) exercises
meaningful IT Governance and provides integrated
portfolio of IT investments and Program Management
and the financial metrics associated with them.
ii) SDLC: Digité Enterprise develops global perspective
and views Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC)
within the context of the larger business maxims and
recognizes the potential value of opportunity related to
systems-level definition, design, and development as
well as the potential impact of adverse effects.
iii)BPM: Business Process Management (BPM) is one
of the drivers of “Business Alignment of IT”. It is
important to understand which of the processes are
not bringing any VALUE to the organization or have
become obsolete. It maintains and sustains constant vigilance by identifying and managing risks
routinely through all phases of the process's life cycle.
iv) Collaboration: Digité Enterprise helps maintain a shared vision by allowing talent, skills
and knowledge to collaborate to achieve common goal, share ownership, and foster collective
communication with complete focus on the results. Open communication is encouraged at and
between all project levels by enabling formal, informal, and impromptu communication.

Enterprise IT Governance if properly supported eventually becomes embedded in the culture and
decision making process. The larger and more diverse the enterprise, the slower the evolutionary
process becomes. Over the years corporations have acquired large number of in-house
applications or point solutions and disparate technologies. This made enterprise technology
infrastructure highly complicated and thereby throwing a visibility challenge. Such technological
challenges make its users unable to use processes and technologies appropriately or in adherence
to the compliance requirements. This operational inefficiency leads to business risk that arises when
processes and systems are unable to meet the desired business requirements for cost reductions,
governance, productivity gains, and revenue generation. Enterprise IT Governance must be viewed
as a long-term initiative that requires continuous investment in order to reap a reward. On the other
hand, we could take the easy way out and just pull up a colorful project portfolio management
dashboard, nod approvingly and pretend we have things covered.

www.digite.com 2 Copyright 2005 Digité, Inc. All rights reserved.