14 REVIEW OF PART B
This chapter presents a brief summary of the second half of the book, Part B. In this part we have covered the implementation of the governance of IT standard 38500, starting with planning for implementation and finishing with optimising the delivered IT governance framework.
BEFORE YOU START
Too often we rush into IT programmes without a pause to stop and reflect on the consequences or the desired outcomes. Often there is a pressing business need to get a new service up and running in the shortest possible time, or there is an urgent IT need to fix a major issue, to block up a potential security loophole or to replace a failing component or system.
The implementation of a successful IT governance framework will affect your entire organisation, your policy and procedures, your IT systems and your assigned IT roles and responsibilities. It will change the way that your business projects involving an IT element (which will be most of your business projects) are delivered from now onwards. Not only does the implementation need some careful planning, but you need to have a very clear view of the expected outcomes and benefits before you start.
You have the standard and you have a view from your governing body as to how they interpret the six principles for your organisation. In Chapter 9 we looked at how you can gain a clear understanding of the expected benefits from working on a comprehensive set of benefits realisation statements with your board sponsor and senior executives.
Before you start on implementation, we identified that you need a very clear idea of the status quo – an evaluation of current governance and related activities. This information, together with the work you have done with the executive and leadership teams on expected benefits, will enable you to put together a gap analysis and to identify areas where work needs to be done to implement the framework.
And, finally, this chapter covered the development of test and training strategies that align with the benefits statements and desired outcomes from your IT governance framework implementation programme. We looked at how bucking the trend, and not leaving testing and training to the last minute in your implementation plan, would help support quality outputs and outcomes.
GETTING THERE
Chapter 10 is all about developing your implementation plan. We looked at how you should proceed, collecting useful artefacts on the way, to ensure that your plan is fully aligned with the organisational goals, and that it will proceed in a way that is acceptable in your organisational culture. We looked at building the plan, assigning roles, evaluating your supporting systems and building the implementation team.
ARRIVING AT THE DESTINATION
By the time you have worked through the book this far you will have a plan to deploy the systems, processes, policies, procedures, restructures, solutions, and so on that together make up your working IT governance framework. In Chapter 11 we worked through a set of checklists to make sure that you have everything in place, and then we looked at the execution of the plan. And, once the framework was deployed, we looked at the final handover tasks of the implementation team.
STAYING THERE
In Chapter 12 we covered the writing up of the dreaded Post Implementation Review (PIR) and using the output of the review to fine-tune the framework and set up maintenance and monitoring processes.
MOVING FORWARD
Finally we looked at optimising your governance framework to ensure that it evolves in line with the organisation to continue to deliver significant benefits. Chapter 13 covered how to get the most value out of assessments and surveys and how to establish measurement methods and organisational expectations to ensure that you continue to build on your success.
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
If you are a member of the IT team tasked with implementing the 38500 standard, I hope you have found this part of the book useful. If you have not already, I encourage you to read the first part of the book – Part A – Introduction to the Governance of IT – or at least the Part A review in Chapter 7.
If you are member of a governing body or a senior executive, you will find that this chapter gives you a good summary of how your CIO, IT executives and IT team could approach the implementation of an IT governance framework based on the 38500 standard.
How you proceed from here depends very much on the nature, type and size of your organisation and how your governing body operates and interacts with your management team. So, once you are ready to proceed with the implementation of an IT governance framework aligned with the ISO standard 38500, and there is a clear understanding of what needs to be achieved, get started! Organisations with good governance practices are more successful than those without. What are you waiting for?