Enterprises will continue to hold the purse strings tight to their chest and will spend only when there is near certainty that there is a positive outcome. This fact, coupled with virtualization and cloud computing, companies can no longer afford to have their IT organizations function like outside service providers, or utilities who simply keep the systems running.
IT has to be measured for their contribution to top and bottom-line performance measures, IT is now expected to provide visibility and transparency into the impact and ROI of its efforts and expenditures. By employing IT Governance tools and processes, agile organizations are able to reallocate IT resources and budget, previously focused on maintenance, and apply those to more strategic initiatives which help drive growth or improve efficiency. Using tools like Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Application Portfolio Management (APM), IT can operate more like a business. IT Governance solutions enable CIOs to better align to the business strategy.
In the recent report from Forrester Research titled “It’s Time For IT Management Software 2.0,” the report author Jean-Pierre Garbani suggested that the recent downturn should serve as a “catalyst for change and an opportunity to mature,” for IT departments. “The economic downturn of the past year puts a different spin on the role of IT: It is not only a matter of providing the right services at the right quality level and the right price, but also a matter of providing all of this with an ever-shrinking budget,” Garbani wrote. “Service value and cost management (doing more with less) suggest that, on top of what could be foreseen as a consequence of technology evolution, IT has or will become a fiscally responsible entity.”
The key message is that IT must be able to quickly react to priority shifts, be able to quantify that they are working on the right projects aligned to the business, and that their resources are allocated sufficiently to achieve success. Aside from the tools mentioned above there continues to be a wealth of knowledge being refined by ISACA commonly referred to as COBIT® to help better understand governance and provide both training and a framework to implement effective IT Governance.
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