PART A
INTRODUCTION TO THE GOVERNANCE OF IT
In essence, the governance of IT is the theory that enables an organisation’s principal decision makers to make better decisions around IT and, at the same time, provides guidance for IT managers who are tasked with IT operations and the design, development and implementation of IT solutions.
You could be forgiven for thinking that IT governance is the latest fad or trend to hit IT. However, IT governance has been an issue since Charles Babbage half dozed off on a book of logarithms and came up with the idea for the first programmable computer in 1822:
I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical Society, at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, ‘Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?’ To which I replied, ‘I am thinking that all these tables’ (pointing to the logarithms) ‘might be calculated by machinery’.
(Babbage 1864)
This idea resulted in Babbage starting on the design for his Difference Engine – a concept that took almost 170 years to deliver as a product. (Take heart if you are reading this and your IT project has overrun by a mere couple of years.) As Babbage soon discovered, designing it was one thing; actually building it required funding and sponsors. Babbage correctly estimated that a large sum of development money was required. In the 1800s, such an expensive IT project required government funding. This is still the case today.
Babbage had some difficulty communicating his business plan to his sponsors. If we were seeking government money today, we would be unlikely to send the lead developer to speak to the relevant funding agencies. As IT people, we still have issues with describing new or ‘leading edge’ technology in such a way that non-IT people can understand exactly what it is we are describing. We can also create problems when we send the IT salesman in to speak to the business, especially if they have been trained to never say no to customer requirements and know enough of the fashionable IT vocabulary to sound convincing.
Business has been burnt with keen and ambitious IT companies describing software that has not been written, hardware that has not yet been built. I have heard many a salesman/IT account manager come out of a successful pre-sales meeting having signed a development contract, proclaiming the immortal words, ‘Well how hard can it be to build it to their requirements?’ Our industry is still fast developing, and we love to use the latest technology to develop our business solutions. Young developers will talk about last year’s technology using the same tone of voice that you might use for describing the funeral of a close colleague. We use the term ‘legacy system’ to describe something that we are too bored to support. No wonder we have problems! But I digress – Babbage had an idea that had huge potential, yet he could not easily demonstrate that potential to his funders. Hindsight is easy. When a Marconi radio was installed in RMS Titanic, it was put in for commercial reasons. Nobody foresaw the potential for emergency communications.
Babbage had every reason to feel aggrieved about his treatment by successive governments. They had failed to understand the immense possibilities of his work, ignored the advice of the most reputable scientists and engineers, procrastinated for eight years before reaching a decision about the difference engine, misunderstood his motives and the sacrifices he had made, and … failed to protect him from public slander and ridicule.
(Dubbey 1978)
He possibly did not have the patience for sales and marketing:
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
(Babbage 1864)
In fact he found the whole process very frustrating, and declared to one of his European colleagues:
You will be able to appreciate the influence of such an Engine on the future progress of science. I live in a country which is incapable of estimating it.
(Babbage 1864)
So … what is IT governance?
Whenever and wherever a governance standards committee gathers together, it is not long before the question of the definition of governance is raised, or, failing that, the question of the difference between governance and management and where the boundary between the two groups lies. So, why are these such problematic questions to answer? I believe it is because there is such a range of ways that a governing body and a management team can work together.
IT governance is concerned with directing IT-related activity across an organisation – it is about strategic planning for IT in line with the vision and mission of the organisation, and the oversight and monitoring of all IT-related activity. It involves creating a decision-making model for IT and information decisions.
IT management is concerned with the application of IT governance through the implementation of policies, processes, procedures and the management of IT-related projects and other activities. The term IT governance is also being used in some literature for the necessary controls put in place, typically by the IT management team, to ensure that IT governance activities can be reported on correctly. If we refer to this type of IT governance as IT operational governance, then the governing body is less likely to be troubled with operational decisions.
The action of the board or governing body to direct IT activities and to build a decision-making model, combined with the action of the IT management teams to develop supporting systems, processes and procedures, result in the development of an IT governance framework.
Figure I illustrates the relationship between governance (what we do) and management (how we do it).
Figure I Governance-management interface
Would IT governance have helped Charles Babbage?
It is always hard to judge the value of something that has not been seen, let alone not even developed. If the representatives from the House of Commons had seen a working prototype of the Difference Engine, I doubt that they would have gauged the potential for such a device. Maybe this sounds a little harsh, but the comment is based on the difficulty experienced by Harrison demonstrating his longitude clock in 1762 to parliamentary representatives. However, let us suppose, though, that Babbage’s funders had had an understanding of IT governance. They would have had a sound decision-making model for working through the funding issues. They would have understood the need to resource his project and, in return for funding, they would have set him some reasonable goals so that they could easily monitor his progress.
Is IT governance still an issue today?
Yes, it is! When we published the first international IT service management standard in 2005, there were still many IT teams making live changes to their production environment and now, eight years and a new version of ITIL on, we have seen a huge increase in service management maturity in organisations. By the time you read this book, IT governance issues might be a thing of the past … but they are certainly abundant as I am writing today. A casual Google search on ‘IT project disasters’ has just brought back 219 million hits. Partly this is a reflection on how many major projects have an IT element, but it is also shows how the IT element is often overlooked or misunderstood. As we move through this book we will be exploring case study IT governance disasters that range from tragedies through to comedies, and we will pick out the lessons learned so that we can protect your organisation from IT death and IT ridicule.