IT Governance Plan
Governance plan is a business document that is like a framework that provides structure to the organizations for design, service agreements, information architecture and infrastructure maintenance.
IT Governance helps to provide structure to match the business techniques with the IT strategies that organizations need to follow. IT governance is an important part of any organization that helps to meet objectives, goals as well as well-being of client and the employees since it helps to align the IT policies with the business decision making and strategies.
Governance enables employees to fulfill their role and responsibilities by establishing frameworks that provide structure, control mechanism, legal and regulatory objectives. They help to produce great results as they help to strategies the work environment to meet goals in the best way possible and instill assurance of client in the organization and its IT Governance program’s practices and control.
Public and private sector organizations use it to ensure the business strategies, financial and technological objectives are supported and complied by their IT program, to implement this governance process requires time and effort but once implemented it monitors organizations operations and boosts growth and success. However, depending on organization size, some practice only the essential IT governance plans where regulated orgs follow a proper planned IT governance program. The most important frameworks are ITIL, COBIT and ISO 27002.
The illustration helps to demonstrate the IT governance model which include the best practices that provide guidelines that are aligned with the strategy they are created to support.
While planning an IT governance program we need to determine the following points -
1. The framework or plan to be designed how will it benefit the IT functioning, how IT will affect the business planning and execution i.e. vision statement.
2. As some plans are created to evaluate risk other help in streamlining the service and operation processes, so we need to careful evaluate the objective of the plan.
3. We need to also see if this plan will be successful executed in the workplace, does it meet the needs of employees and client.
4. It should also have guiding principles along with policies and standards.
To ensure effective implementation of the plan, it should be supported by the higher managers and staff, the plan should also be reviewed by a team to implement it effectively. There should be open communication channels from top to bottom employees as t will help to monitor the progress.
The plan I would select is COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology), this framework was created by the ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association) for IT governance and management. It is one of the recognized programs that provides guidelines to organization to help maintain quality, control and reliability. It ensures integrity of the IT systems as well as improved risk management practices.
The following are the important points from the COBIT plan –
1. Involving Senior Management — Taking an example of my workplace, our leadership team is actively involved in the decision-making process pertaining to business and IT department. They take stakeholders needs and on that basis involvement of the IT initiatives and plan required for business is made. The involvement of leadership in ay organization is important for implementation of COBIT plan. The senior management instils authority to the employees and adds confidence in the plan, if management follows the polices of the framework it will help employees to embrace it and will help in meeting client needs.
2. Minimizes Risk — Since it is a holistic approach, it reduces risk of security breaches, helps to maintain data reliability, helps to create stable infrastructure and provides accountability that leads to success of projects at organizations. The polices of the framework help to provide organization a guideline to follow in their everyday work. It also enables them to follow a structured work culture. Sometimes problems in the companies are due to not having any IT governance plans and COBIT improves the initiatives, recognizes the problems and implements the changes at root level wherever required.
3. Business Performance — As IT is required to perform day to day activities, a plan will help to reduce cost and wastage in everyday operations. It helps company to go for new business as IT support is required for almost all types of business opportunities in one way or the other and it will provide strategies to get business from clients to meet the needs. The other advantage in helping business is integrates the other governance plans so it has more integrated approach, it
4. Regulation — Due to our increasing dependency on IT and role of IT in our daily work life, we need regulations to maintain safety and reliability of information. The COBIT model helps to incorporate proper compliance, as information security is an important aspect of this model it makes sure that client data is fully compliant and meets standard.
Conclusion
From my research and readings, I understood that implementing COBIT in any organization irrespective of its size is a good approach to make organizations systematic, this model provides simplification as well as the organization needs to identify its needs and how this model can be best used to serve the purpose. It offers processes that provide structure, enable growth and success in the organization.
