The New Sweet Spot For IT Governance
 The IT
Governance Institute recently published the 2008 version of its
IT
Governance Global Survey and it's an interesting read from front
to back. The report is divided into "13 Key Messages" and
number 6 caught my eye.
At first glance, it's a no-brainer. The
tag-line for key message number 6 is, "IT Related Problems
Persist." Well, duh. Does anyone know of an IT shop that doesn't
have problems? Anyone? But when you dig into the survey questions and
results, some interesting facts appear.
The ITGI survey asked 750 CIO/CEO level
people from around the world, from companies in all sorts of sectors,
sizes, and geographies, and asked them about the types of IT problems
they experienced. These were categorized and classified into the
"Compound Problem Index." They presented the 2007 vs 2005
results.
The first thing that jumps out at me is
that the number of respondents that claimed to have had "Serious
IT Operational Incidents" or "security or privacy
incidents" was relatively low, in fact almost at the bottom of
the list. Less than half of some of the other issues in the Compound
Problem Index. Likewise, very few respondents cited problems
involving legal / regulatory compliance, although the numbers are up
slightly in 2007 from 2005.
Two of the top four IT problems
identified by the respondents were human resource related, either not
having enough staff or having inadequately trained staff. Almost
twice as many respondents identified these as problems areas above
the other issues.
The other two items in the top three
list of issues in the Compound Problem Index are "IT Service
Delivery Problems" and "High cost of IT with low or uproven
return on investment (ROI)". To me this is a wake up call for
those of us who are interested in this space. Analysts have dubbed
our market segment as "governance, risk, and compliance"
(GRC), but these issues were rated far lower in importance than
service delivery and return on investment. I happen the believe there
is lots of value to be had from risk management frameworks and
compliance alignment activities. But this survey does suggest that we
need to be paying a lot more attention to the intersection of service
management and governance than we have been in the past and we need
to be paying a lot more attention to expressing ROI for IT projects
that are historically very difficult to quantify.
Image credit: Cover page of the IT Governance Global Survey report, published by the ITGI.
May 12 2008, 08:58:53 AM EDT
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