In this article, you will understand how putting an IT governance plan in place makes it possible, among other things:
- To adopt only the most suitable technologies
- To increase coordination between the business lines and the IT department
- To avoid wasting time on non-viable projects
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Innovating: a question of survival
- New “As a Service” technologies
- Giving yourself the means to optimise your investments
- Towards a new IT department: adaptable and responsive
- Not giving in to the siren song
- What is information system governance?
- What are the three rules for steering information systems?
Innovating: a question of survival
According to the latest EBG barometer, 80 % of companies regard innovation as a strategic priority. Indeed, it is a question of survival if they are to endure in markets that are almost all “disrupted” and faced with consumers who are ever more uncompromising and volatile.
But innovation must not simply amount to releasing new offers and / or adapting to new marketing and communication trends. Nor must it be content with creating in/outbound marketing scenarios and cross-channel triggers to increase the conversion rate. That is not innovation as it must be thought of in 2017. Any more than being engaged in Big Data or IoT thinking, in a DevOps movement, or claiming to be “Cloud ready”…
When the cursor is placed from the strategic point of view, innovation must be regarded as a set of considerations which (before dwelling on the topics mentioned above) hold that nothing can be done over the long term and profitably without:
- Being focused on a perfect command of the uses expected by your targets
- Having a real desire to improve business interactions, with the aim of increasing their productivity.
New “As a Service” technologies
Until now, IT departments have “cobbled solutions together” to meet business needs (taking, on average, 6 months to respond). There is no doubt that these “cobbled-together fixes” meet their objectives fairly well, but it has to be said that they are also extremely rigid and costly, particularly in terms of support and maintenance.
Through the Cloud, the notion of AaaS (Anything as a Service), also called XaaS (X for everything), has become the norm. Everything is now pooled, available on demand and paid for on usage. In short, owning things is increasingly being called into question.
Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, sums it up: “We have now entered the era where it is no longer the IT department that makes all the purchasing decisions, but where an HR director can choose Workday for their payroll system. Amazon Web Services for Cloud infrastructure, Stripe for payments or Twilio for communications: all these services are today the ingredients that make up the applications we use every day”.
The technological advances offered by the Cloud and the web giants impose a complete change of paradigm on every ecosystem. Outsourcing IT governance avoids having to invest in hardware and staff. Using the tools offered by Google, Microsoft, Amazon and the like makes it possible to benefit from new technologies as from a scalable API, constantly updated. This is therefore supposed to allow an IT department to concentrate solely on what makes its value: its expertise.
In the light of this, it appears difficult for an IT department not to meet the new needs of the marketing, general management and finance departments.
But how can this be achieved calmly and in a genuinely secure way? How can you use only what you really need? Which method should you choose in relation to your business model and your challenges: public, private or hybrid Cloud? How can you support your staff’s upskilling in order to ensure the operational upkeep of your information system in Cloud mode? Lastly, how can you make your information system a source of profit and the engine of your innovation over the long term?
Giving yourself the means to optimise your investments
As we have seen, hosting your information system in the Cloud (finally) makes it possible to innovate, for various reasons:
- Moving much faster to experiment, and at lower cost (reduced investment: CAPEX),
- Sparing your IT operations staff (reduced running costs: OPEX) all the drudgery associated with operational upkeep (MCO).
Outsourcing all or part of your infrastructure to the Cloud is therefore clearly profitable, because it makes it possible, through SLAs, to benefit from a tailor-made service as well as from dedicated lead engineers, available 24/7/365. Provided, of course, that the provider in question is conscientious, available and genuinely committed to what is at stake…
However, in a context where the IT department increasingly needs to justify its spending and to prove that it delivers concrete benefits, it is not always easy to grasp the future billing of public Cloud providers.
There is therefore a real need for simplification and transparency in billing, so as to allow IT departments, but also the other business functions (finance and general management in particular), to know precisely what the ROI will be. Here again, putting an IT governance plan in place is essential to achieve this.
Towards a new IT department: adaptable and responsive
How can general management, finance, marketing and IT departments finally be on the same wavelength and help each other without preconceptions or passing the hot potato? At present, more than 50% of Cloud services escape the IT department!
This is the bugbear of companies when they want to begin their digital transformation.
How can an internal department be prevented from bypassing the IT department over the use of interfaces and applications (“shadow IT”)?
Today, to innovate, you have to be agile! The business departments therefore need a responsive IT department. Putting an IT governance plan in place allows more relevant development phases (PoC: Proof of Concept and PoV: Proof of Value). It makes it possible to avoid gaps between the project owner and the prime contractor.
While there is a real shortage of multidisciplinary profiles (DevOps): calling on an external provider that is an expert in Cloud solutions thus allows an IT department to organise itself differently, to keep control over its perimeter while being able to respond quickly and well to business needs.
Not giving in to the siren song
All these proposals are full of promise, but strategic innovation has to be thought through, in a dynamic of constant adaptation to the new challenges that the company and its internal business lines will have to face. In concrete terms, you really do need to put an IT governance plan in place in order to know precisely where to set the cursor and avoid excesses.
You do not necessarily need to migrate to the Cloud radically. It may be better to aim at making your OPEX / CAPEX pay off by supporting change flexibly and starting with a hybrid approach. Likewise, you are not necessarily obliged to throw yourself headlong into a Big Data or IoT project when it is not a driver of ROI for your company.
It is also essential to remove business silos in order to optimise the time-to-market of genuinely innovative offers that meet the real needs of your target. This goes through the creation of business hubs and the adoption of “toolbox” type working methods (SCRUM methods).
But in the end, you really have to (re)think the end user! What are their expectations in terms of experience and interaction with you? Does your Cloud provider support you throughout your transformation?
Information systems governance, IS governance, aims to improve the functioning of the information systems of companies and, more generally, of organisations. It concerns not only the Information Systems Department, but also all the business functions of the company that contribute to value creation through information systems. Information systems governance “aims to define what the main objectives, functions and tasks are in order to feed the new function of information management.”
An information system must be steered. For that, it is necessary to:1. Set objectives linked to the company’s strategy,2. Link the innovations made possible by the information system by creating new products, innovative processes or more efficient services,3. Take into account the added value created by the information system in relation to the expenditure generated by putting it in place, and this with a long-term view.
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