Enterprise SOA

Chapter SEVENTEEN. ESA and IT Governance

In order to assert better control over IT, align it with business objectives, and keep its potential benefits and risks in balance, corporations in recent years have paid considerable attention to the issue of IT governance. Also spurring this renewed attention are financial regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, which call for improved documentation of IT systems and tighter controls over who uses them and to what end. The result is that enterprises have sought to bring to IT the kind of streamlined and rigorously defined business processes and reporting structures that IT has helped to make possible just about everywhere else in the enterprise.

If a formal definition of IT governance is required, it's hard to top the one provided by Jeanne W. Ross and Peter Weil in their book, IT Governance (Harvard Business School Press): "specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT."

IT governance, they elaborate, provides a framework in which the decisions made about IT issues are aligned with the overall business strategy and culture of the enterprise. Governance is concerned, therefore, with setting directions, establishing standards and principles, and prioritizing investments.

Throughout this book, we have talked about how ESA ushers in fundamental changes in every area. It changes the relationship between business and IT, a relationship that is at the heart of most governance issues. In ...