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The phrase ‘IT Governance’ has become increasingly popular in the past few years. Also termed as administration, management or control, IT Governance can be defined as “a structure of relationships and processes to direct and control the enterprise in order to achieve the enterprise’s goals by adding value while balancing risk versus return over IT and its processes.”
Although IT is one of the most valuable assets for an organization, it is often the least understood. While business units formulate strategies to increase profits, the IT Function simply follows instructions from business units to deliver automated solutions to satisfy business requirements. To put it in a similar phrase, IT has always reacted to business needs rather than proactively worked with business needs.
The key business units in an enterprise are marketing, finance, operations, product development, personnel or human resources and sales. These business units interact with IT resources – applications, hardware, systems, data, people, processes and technology to increase profits. A considerable amount of time, money and effort is used in ensuring that IT resources deliver the required results to business units. the following figure shows the relationship between business units and associated IT resources.
Business Units and IT Resources
Over the past few years, increasing market competition, more demanding customers, regulatory laws and cutting edge technologies have forced enterprises to sit back and assess the role of IT. Enterprises are now increasingly involving IT in strategic planning and determining the direction of the company. Business units are getting more involved in the regular functioning of IT and vice-versa to help the organization leverage all benefits technology offers. IT Governance integrates and institutionalizes good practices to ensure that the enterprise’s IT supports the business objectives.
In particular, top management needs to know if information is being managed by the enterprise so that it is likely to achieve its objectives, resilient enough to learn and adapt, judiciously managing the risks it encounters and appropriately recognizing opportunities and acting upon them.
Ecomnets IT Governance Framework
Ecomnets has developed an IT Governance framework to enable maximum returns from investment in the Information Technology Division.
The IT Governance Framework adopted by Ecomnets achieves the following objectives-
- Provides a pre-configured solution that enables rapid implementation at client site
- Aligns business and IT Goals
- Creates an IT Process Framework
- Harvests existing resources in an enterprise
- Increases efficiency with use of emerging technologies like business rules, business processes and dashboards
- Ensures compliance with the Sarbanes Oxley Act
- Decreases time, money and effort spent to maintain a controlled environment.
Ecomnets IT Governance Methodology
The 5 Phase Methodology adopted by Ecomnets identifies key functional areas within the IT Division at every phase and creates a process framework for each of the identified areas.
The following figure shows the IT Governance Methodology adopted by Ecomnets. The solution is built and deployed to cater exclusively to client needs. In the progress versus maturity graph, as the coordinates increase along both axes, a robust IT Governance solution with the advantage of being Sarbanes Oxley compliant is deployed at the client enterprise.
Ecomnets IT Governance Methodology – Progress versus Maturity Graph
