itSMFI 2016 Forum Focus - September Forum Focus ITSMFI Sept 2016 | Page 16

For example, IT Governance might decide, to use a
third party service, to save the cost of resources, and to
reduce what it sees as the risk. If the value to
the Governing body depends on that service being
secure and highly available, this will be a dangerous
error.
The governing body is unable to communicate its
requirements for value to IT because they have
different assumptions and use different language.
In practice, what IT then does, when it is doing well, is
to get in touch with the business units and establish
what their requirements are. It then uses these to infer
what the values are and tries to deliver services
according to what it sees business units seem to
require.
but it certainly has been recognised as an impediment
to progress.
Many attempts have been made to solve it. Some have
improved matters considerably.
Unfortunately, the gap between the governing body
and IT is still, mostly, unbridged. If you go to any IT
Service Management conference, or talk to IT people
generally, you will often hear how difficult, or
impossible, they find it to communicate with ‘the
business’. Often ‘the business’ is seen as capricious,
and unaware of what it needs - which is unfair. The
management of business units know exactly what they
need to do, at any given time, to comply with the
requirements of the governing body. They are not the
governing body, though, and their job is operational
and tactical. They will know their own particular
strategy, within the corporate strategy, but not the
bigger picture, or the longer-term strategic goals -
properly, these are the business of the governing body,
that has the job to set direction for the whole
company.
Part of the difficulty is historic. The main decision
making tool used by governing bodies, is the business
case. The business case is judged against its
contribution to the business dynamics, and these are
reported from the general ledger. Unfortunately, many
of the activities that take place in IT, and much of the
equipment used in IT, does not make itself visible in
the general ledger. Instead of seeing what value IT
delivers to the organisation, the board sees a cost
centre, and that causes loss of value to other,
productive, parts of the business.
In effect, IT
management.
is
being
governed
by
business
This mis-match between the operational value
required, and the value that IT is delivering to
operations can be extreme. IT is often then seen as the
problem, causing disruption to operations. In order to
defend itself, IT uses IT governance frameworks to
prove that it is being adequately governed.
Good though these frameworks are, they cannot make
up for the disconnect from leadership, from
governance.
We see that, in this case, IT is Management is doing
things right - at least in its eyes. But.. it is not doing the
right things.
The problem has existed for a very long time. It may
not have been stated in the way it has been stated here,
16 itSMFI Forum Focus—September 2016
To be fair, it is not only IT that is in this position.
Many other business units have had their own
struggles to establish the value of their contribution to
corporate value. Manufacturing and Retail have used
metaphors like the ‘supply chain’ to make this value
evident.
IT Service Management has tried to resolve the issue
by using the service metaphor. ITIL does an excellent
job of providing the guidance necessary to design,
build and supply services to an organisation.
Unfortunately, it is often seen, as in its name, as
‘management’ - a tool, not for governance, but for
operational management.
Which leads to the solution:
The solution is to take the existing work, such as that
found in ITIL, Cobit, Togaf, MoV, MoR, Business
Analysis, and build it into a governance framework.