There’s an increased chance of everyone falling asleep when they hear “IT governance,” making it a high-risk activity. That’s only fine if your newborn won’t nap, but not for the regular team meeting of the week.
IT governance is an essential tool to manage, monitor, and promote the value creation our IT brings to the business. Let's take a look at the top IT governance best practices that will improve your workflows and organizational culture.
Wait, What’s IT Governance?
IT governance is a business improvement tool aimed to ensure your IT—infrastructure, people, policies and practices—contributes as much to your business goals as possible. It’s a bold attempt to squeeze every bit of value out of your IT.
IT governance is not the same as IT management. IT governance is a subset of corporate governance. It provides the strategy and leadership, while IT management provides the tactics and tasks.
IT Governance Best Practices
To an enthusiast, IT governance is a wild ride. It’s an adrenaline-fueled mashup of different principles and strategies that percolate to every level and department of an organization, across three broad themes:
- Aligning IT strategy with business goals
- Mitigating risk
- Monitoring and managing performance
Here are some of our top IT governance best practices for each of these awesome themes:
1. Aligning IT Strategy With Business Goals
IT governance sets the direction for the investment and effort that a business puts into IT, to make sure that IT supports the business goals fully. This means that your team can be confident it’s doing the right things in the right way. It’s also a sign that IT is valued as a business asset, which will comfort you as you plug away at provisioning spares in your dark basement office.
IT governance best practices for aligning IT with business strategy can include:
- Creating an IT strategy that supports the overall business strategy. (Duh!).
- Reviewing current IT operations to identify strengths and weaknesses, and make a plan with the IT team to build on the strengths and address the weaknesses.
- Horizon-scanning: What tech will your business need in the future? How can the business stay competitive using IT? You’ll look inwards at the tech you’ll need to improve your business processes, and you’ll look outwards at what tech might be available in the future, to better serve your customers or increase your market share.
- Implementing a robust IT procurement strategy: A strategic IT procurement strategy makes sure you have the IT resources you need to support your business goals, just when you need them.
2. Mitigating Risk
IT governance is big on risk management and mitigation. It provides a framework for identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks relating to IT activities. This is a high-level checkmark for addressing all the data security and compliance you can eat. A security-positive attitude will save your business from all the badnesses, such as downtime, data breaches, and lost reputation.
Best practice IT governance for mitigating risk can include:
- Defining roles and responsibilities for aspects of risk management.
- Deciding appropriate risk levels, and creating a framework for managing that risk.
- Addressing business-wide issues, such as handling of confidential data.
- Working towards compliance with regulatory frameworks such as SOC 2, SEC, or HIPAA, depending on the business need.
- Appointing external auditors and assessors to ensure audits, reviews, and analyses of IT risks are independent.
- Ensuring that the IT team is fully resourced with the budget, person power, and skills to implement breach-busting practices such as Mobile Device Management, onboarding automation, and proper data backup policies.
- Creating and reviewing disaster recovery plans.
- Embedding staff cybersecurity training within corporate and individual development plans.
- Staying current with new data security or legal compliance requirements.
3. Monitoring and Managing Performance
A big chunk of IT governance is directed towards monitoring and measuring the performance of IT teams, tech, and activities against the goals that support the business strategy. This means a whole heap of performance management best practices, including:
- Establishing performance standards for IT, and how they’re measured.
- Ensuring that the IT team has the resources they need to perform well.
- Reviewing IT performance against the standards, and recommending changes if required.
- Co-creating a culture of continual improvement with the IT team.
- Reviewing performance standards to ensure they’re still in line with business goals.
- Making recommendations for a change of IT suppliers when necessary.
So, how can you get your people excited about IT governance? The truth is that you can’t. But don’t let that get in the way of great IT governance for your business. the kind that’s the envy of all the other kids.
Our risk remediation and audit services support at least one, two, or fifteen of those juicy IT governance best practices that you’re foaming at the ears to implement. Give us a call. We’re here to help.