The IT Skeptic - governance

Conflicting principles

skeptic — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 21:12:46 +0000

A client was developing a set of principles to guide a DevOps transformation and I proposed the two following principles to be included:

Honour existing processes, records, and controls. They arose for a reason.
Streamline and simplify all processes, records, and controls. Challenge the level of ceremony.

ISACA Bylaws change 2015

skeptic — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 21:37:37 +0000

Rumblings of dissent over ISACA internal governance? Say it ain't so.

Dark IT

skeptic — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 19:31:18 +0000

Dark IT is a more specific term than "Shadow IT" and self-explanatory. Dark IT is a threat to corporate interests for which the IT department is accountable. But the IT department can't do a damned thing about Dark IT in the absence of effective enterprise governance of IT (EGIT).

That's the issue we need to solve before we can address Dark IT.

How to deal with Shadow IT

skeptic — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 21:40:16 +0000

The issue arises when a business unit decides that they are exempt from organisational IT policy; that they have a right to act in the interests of their business unit rather than the enterprise as a whole; that they have no accountability to a central It function. When this happens, it is an indicator of a total failure of corporate governance, a dereliction of duty by the governors of the organisation. Shadow IT is ungoverned IT.

Real IT is at three levels: governance, management and execution

skeptic — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 23:12:29 +0000

There are three levels to IT: governance, management and execution. Only the execution layer can be decentralised or outsourced.

A review of Governance of IT

skeptic — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 01:58:10 +0000

Here is an important book: Governance of IT, by Alison Holt. Everyone in any role of authority in IT should read it, and anyone else would benefit from a better understanding of governance as well - it is a horrendously misunderstood and misused term.

Better still, everyone in executive management or governance of any organisation should read it. Well I can dream.

Thoughts on SMcongress and the future of ITSM

skeptic — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:03:30 +0000

The Service Management Inaugural Congress (SMCongress) is the output of the "RevNet" event at the 2013 Fusion ITSM conference in the USA. As a few of you know, twenty-something ITSM thinkers got together in a room to see what would happen. This happened. It has been followed by some unlovely debate and a number of articles.

I had hoped SMcongress would pass me by, but it seems not. A number of you really want to know what I think about SMcongress, (especially those who would like me to say the things you can't), so here you go.

In summary, SMcongress is full of emotion and short on ideas, it lacks clarity or focus, it is addressing the wrong problem in the wrong way, and like all these collaborative "community" movements in business it is unlikely to come to anything. If it can be built upon to create focus, to get back to useful outcomes, and to address the real issues, then its passion, inclusiveness, and energy might be harnessed to some good. I offer here three concrete solutions to the issues of IT and ITSM that I think SMcongress should be focusing on.

Meet In The Middle: Slow IT and Fast IT

skeptic — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 03:04:51 +0000

I've talked before about the need for Slow IT. Here then is a strategy for IT to address the issue, to make a value proposition for the parent organisation about how Slow IT will deliver benefit, will allow IT to be more response, will enable Fast IT.

The mad competitive scramble

skeptic — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:05:27 +0000

The rate of change in IT is unsustainable, and is in fact a crowd hysteria. Just because the technology is changing that fast doesn't mean we have to, or can.

A major driver for that scrabbling rush is "competition". That is an over-used trump-card that needs some close skeptical scrutiny in all the companies playing it. Tweet this

More Future of IT Management

skeptic — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:37:03 +0000

In which the IT Swami updates his vision of the future of ITSM and the IT Skeptic looks forward to upcoming conferences.

IT: to protect and serve

skeptic — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 23:16:46 +0000

The motto "to protect and serve" is a good one for IT.

Governors govern

skeptic — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 22:40:02 +0000

I've said it before on this blog a number of times but it bears repeating: governors govern.

Organisations have failed their IT like bad parents

skeptic — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 20:14:27 +0000

Fed up with the modern failures of IT being all IT's fault, I thought it was time to do something about it. So here is a white paper aimed at educating the business world to their responsibilities for IT. The world has really messed up owning IT (Information Technology), like a bad parent messing up a child's upbringing, letting them develop bad habits. We need to do better. We can do better. We need to do it soon, as modern IT requirements become ever more complex. [The white paper was slightly edited for version 5 in June 2012]

Whining about the IT department

skeptic — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:09:28 +0000

If ever there was a classic example of how business people can become spoilt whining brats when it comes to IT services, it is in a recent article in Forbes online. Clearly, organisations have a stupendous amount of work to do to educate their staff in how to be grown-up about IT as a resource (no it is not IT's job to do this):

COBIT 5: muddying governance and management

skeptic — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:48:47 +0000

Execution always falls short of expectation. I'm still pondering my impressions of COBIT5 - more on that later - but one thing is clear: they haven't fully fixed the governance/management thing. [Update: I didn't get this right, see comments below]

How business has failed IT like a bad parent

skeptic — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:09:37 +0000

The world has really screwed up with owning IT, like a bad parent screwing up a child's upbringing and letting them develop bad habits.

How does IT survive with no policy framework?

skeptic — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:51:04 +0000

As far as I can tell there is no such thing as a policy framework for IT. ISO38500 bangs on about the need for policies. ITIL and COBIT mention legions of policies. But I can find nothing that gives us a comprehensive list of necessary policies, let alone describes what a policy structure looks like and what the priorities are.

Governance support

skeptic — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:34:05 +0000

In my up-coming book Basic Service Management, I am using the term "governance support" to distinguish from governance.

Governance directives as input to ITIL

skeptic — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:50:06 +0000

Being a simple soul with only a limited grasp of ITIL, sometimes I'm sure I've missed something obvious. Like when I went looking in the Service Strategy book to find where the overall business plan or organisational strategy informs the service strategy. If IT is your business, if you are an IT service provider company, then I can see SS working. But for an internal service provider, for an IT department, SS reads as if service strategy is developed in isolation from the rest of the organisation, as if we treat the rest of the organisation as a remote customer of services instead of as the same team, from whom we take direction. At what point in SS do we ask the Board? At what point does the corporate executive inject policy? Where do we align with the business strategy? Or did I miss something?

Terminological debasement of governance

skeptic — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:27:59 +0000

Two excellent publications recently commented on what I call terminological debasement of the term "governance".