It Governance — An Integrated Framework and Roadmap: How to Plan, Deploy and Sustain for Competitive Advantage

The issues, opportunities and challenges of effectively managing and governing an organization's Information Technology (IT) demands, investments and resources has become a major concern of the Board and executive management in enterprises on a global basis. A rapidly growing number of organizations have become increasingly dependent on a broad array of technologies to manage and grow their businesses. IT is an integral part of most organizations today and will certainly become more critical in the future. IT governance represents a journey (not an end state in itself), which focuses on sustaining value and confidence across the business. Many companies today start on a narrow path or shot gun approach and focus on the compliance component (e.g. SOX, BASEL III) of IT governance, without developing a balanced approach consisting of both a top down framework and roadmap together with bottom up implementation to address the broad range of IT governance issues and opportunities in a planned, coordinated, prioritized and cost effective manner. This paper proposes a comprehensive and integrated IT governance framework and roadmap which identifies the appropriate current and emerging best practice methodologies for each of the major IT Governance components that must be addressed in any approach and is critical for companies to achieve more effective alignment and management of IT. The framework can serve as a guideline for any organization to select and customize the appropriate approach applicable to its environment, plans, priorities, capabilities and available resources. The findings and implications are based on extensive primary and secondary research and are grounded in a review of current and emerging industry and government best practices and select case studies of leading organizations based on the recently published book by the author entitled, "Implementing Effective IT Governance and IT Management," published by Van Haren Publishers, 2015.