KEY CONCEPT
Governance
Practices
IT governance is a set of practices designed to ensure align-
ment between the business vision and IT strategy, which
facilitates the oversight of these enterprise demands
through consistent management, cohesive policies, guid-
ance, processes and decision rights for a given area of
responsibility.
IT management is primarily concerned with the effective,
stable and optimal execution of technology operations, in
support of any existing governance strategies, and is tacti-
cally focused.
where it is tactically different, you need to create new poli-
cies and procedures. Below, we outline some ways to start
building your cloud governance strategy.
Change Management
Change management is one of the easier functions to adapt,
yet is a common bottleneck. The overall process stays the
same in the cloud, but you need to find ways to streamline
it wherever possible, such as finding decisions that can be
standardized and automated. Since changes in the cloud
can be done much faster, you are looking for ways to lever-
age automation and speed up the approval process while
still balancing risk.
Most companies have a robust process to govern change,
which includes a change approval board that sets a com-
monly accepted throughput and frequency (establishing
what is too slow, too infrequent). Rapid cycle time between
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WINTER 2019
the business need and production deployment drives the
most value out of the cloud. (This is your time to value.)
Through the use of automated development and deploy-
ment, processes will become streamlined, quickly making
change governance the bottleneck on this road to value.
A common place to accelerate change management is any-
where you can adopt a preauthorized, lower risk, “standard”
class of change within the process, which would flow
through automatically. If you do not have an existing stan-
dard change process with automatic approvals for certain
changes, you need to develop that out of the gate. Once
that new workflow is adopted, establish a regular optimiza-
tion review of your change process. Drive to minimize the
changes that require a trip to the change review board by
standardizing as much as possible over time. This approach
is key to driving down your cycle time and increasing your
velocity.