Gary Hardy from ITpreneurs had an excellent post a few months ago advising IT management on ten ways that they could be unsuccessful in executing their job responsibilities. I found all ten to be very insightful (and accurate), but I wanted to share my thoughts on three of Gary’s observations:
1. Assuming Governance of IT Is Only Related to Risk and Compliance
Governance has always been hard to define, so it’s not surprising that IT leaders latch on to the more concrete elements of governance like Risk and Compliance. However, IT governance is much more than that. It is about aligning IT activities with the organization’s strategy and ensuring that efforts to run, grow, and transform the IT function are delivering value to the business. Even the approach to risk management should include considerations towards value and acceptance of risks that benefit organizational goals. (Be sure to check out Protiviti’s Technology Risk 2.0: A New Approach whitepaper for some thoughts on how to include “positive” risk consideration in your governance activities.)
3. Assuming IT Is Only for The “IT Function”
I’ve said it before, there is no “IT” and “Business” in today’s organizations. We use those terms to delineate between who supports the technology and who uses the technology. But, ultimately, the IT function needs to see itself as a part of the overall organization and partner with “the business” to achieve the organization’s goals and objectives.
6. Defining SLAs in Technical Delivery Terms
This is an area that I’ve been harping on a lot recently. It is easy for IT practitioners to identify metrics based on accessible information (i.e. percentage of unplanned downtime, number of help desk calls resolved within a certain time frame), but that information is often meaningless to the business leaders. IT Management must explore ways to make their SLAs and other metrics meaningful to the business (i.e. Lost revenue as a result of unplanned downtime, Lost productivity due to help desk responsiveness). These business-focused metrics are often “softer” than the technical delivery measurements, but they provide better insights to the business stakeholders.
As I mentioned previously, all 10 observations are insightful and I recommend the article as required reading for anyone in IT management.
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