IT Portfolio Management Step-by-Step: Unlocking the Business Value of Technology

3.1. INTRODUCTION

Conflict and competition drive each business unit to its peak performance. However, unrecognized or poorly managed conflict will lead a company into disarray. Governance is foremost a process designed to resolve ambiguity, manage shortand long-range goals, and mitigate conflict within a company and between divisions, business units, and corporate. IT governance is a systematic relationship between information policy, processes, and people enacted to enable the freedom of thinking (innovation), decision making, and action (initiative) without compromising the overall objectives of the company. It defines and mandates the parameters (e.g., aligning IT activities to business objectives, setting cost and risk thresholds, and providing IT value goals) within which individual employees are given freedom and autonomy to react to their marketplace and customers while maintaining consistency with the business policies that drive the company.

IT governance serves the primary role of focusing IT efforts and resources on high value-added support of the business, application of best practices, and reuse while keeping the company out of low value-added investments. Enterprise governance must establish policy that articulates guidelines within which expected behaviors occur defining the processes and defining and delegating responsibility and accountability for operating the business accordingly. IT governance has two primary functions:

1. Policy development (structure): policy ...