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Managing IT as an investment
Governing investments is about making sure that money is spent wisely. Managing IT as an investment is means that IT decisions are made like any other business decisions. When you are planning a Vista migration, ERP upgrade or investing in a new business application, bring all these investments to a steering committee with a business case. This way decisions are based on business outcomes, not only on personal opinions.
A good business case describes:
- Outcomes: what do we get by implementing this
- Rational for the investments: why should we do this
- Estimated business value. This can be reduced costs in business processes, improved capability to meet strategic objectives, reduced risks of discontinuations in business critical services etc.
- Estimated costs: how much do we expect to invest in both money and used resources
- Timeframe that it involves.
Check out for more ideas in frameworks like ValIT (www.isaca.org/valit).
Mitigating risks
Essential risks in IT are related to your most critical IT services and external regulations and laws. Critical business services are most often standard services like networks and email, and/or business applications related to online stores, customer support, logistics (ERP) etc. Communicate risks in these critical services to IT steering and explain how these risks are currently managed. Direct (preferably real-time) view on the IT infrastructure (networks, servers, applications, integrations) and well-established change management helps your team to provide the needed information.
Risks related to regulations and laws include license compliance, industry specific regulations, SOX etc. IT needs to understand these regulations and communicate company status related to these areas.
To sum it up, IT governance is an extension to corporate governance. This means that IT spending, investments and major risks are presented to management in a manner that they understand. This provides management tools to ensure that IT doesn’t compromise the company and stakeholder interests.
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