Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

1.9. IT GOVERNANCE APPROACHES

IT governance is still an immature discipline for the most part, despite the IT management frameworks mentioned above. One of the more insightful IT governance approaches was developed by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross in their book IT Governance.^[] Weill and Ross provide an excellent, high-level perspective of IT governance by simplifying IT governance down to five key decisions and six IT governance constructs. Weill and Ross define IT governance as follows:

^[] Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decisions for Superior Results, Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

IT governance: Specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT.^[]

^[] Ibid., p. 8.

Weill and Ross essentially focus IT governance on five key decisions:

1. IT Principles. Codifying the role of IT in supporting the business through fundamental IT principles that help with alignment and decision making.

2. IT Architecture. Defining enterprise integration and technology standardization requirements. (We prefer to treat this category of governance as EA, and expand the definition to include the business architecture, application architecture, technology/infrastructure architecture, and the information architecture.)

3. Infrastructure Requirements. Determining shared and enabling technology services, such as data centers, networks, telecommunications, desktops, and computing capacity, that are required by the ...