IT Governance

Purpose

An enterprise IT Governance strategy, and an appropriate organization for implementing the strategy, must be established with the backing of top management, clarifying who owns the enterprise's IT resources, and in particular, who has ultimate responsibility for their integration.

The purpose of IT governance arrangements is to ensure that the senior management of an organization retains control of, and responsibility for, its IT operation.

There is a similarity between technical architecture and architecture in the physical world, in that politics has an important role to play in the acceptance of both architectures. In the real world, it is the dual politics of the environment and commerce, while in the world of the technical architecture a consideration of corporate politics is critical.

A technical architecture imposed without appropriate political backing is bound to fail. In order to succeed, the technical architecture must reflect the needs of the organisation and recognize that those needs must be derived from consensus. Technical Architects, if they are not involved in the development of business strategy, must at least have a fundamental understanding of it and of the prevailing business issues facing the organisation. It may even be necessary for them to be involved in the system deployment process and to ultimately own the investment and product selection decisions arising from the implementation of the technical architecture.

Elements

There are three important elements of IT Governance strategy that relate particularly to the acceptance and success of architecture within the enterprise:

A cross-organizational Architecture Board must be established with the backing of top management to oversee the implementation of the IT governance strategy.
A comprehensive set of Architectural Principles should be established, to guide, inform and support the way in which an organization sets about fulfilling its mission through the use of IT.
An Architecture Compliance strategy should be adopted - specific measures (more than just a statement of policy) to ensure compliance with the architecture, including project impact assessments, a formal architecture compliance review process, and possibly including the involvement of the architecture team in product procurement.