Lecture 1

Question 1

What is IT governance?

Answer 1

“the framework for the leadership, organizational structures and business processes, standards and compliance with these standards, which ensures that the organization’s information systems support and enable the achievements of its strategies and objectives.”

It is “specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in using IT”.

Question 2

What 5 IT decisions are there?

Answer 2

• IT principles: clarifying the business role of IT
• IT Architecture: defining integration and standardization.
• IT infrastructure strategies: determining shared and enabling services (by hardware, software, networks, facilities.)
• Business application needs: specifying the business needs for purchased or internally developed IT applications
• IT investment and prioritization: choosing which initiatives to fund and how much to spend

Question 3

Which 6 governance archetypes are there?

Answer 3

• Business monachy: a group of business excecutives or individual excecutives (CxO’s). Includes committees or senior business executives (may include CIO). Excludes IT executives acting independently.
• IT monarchy: individuals or groups of IT excecutives.
• Feudal: Business unit leaders, key process owners or their delegates
• Federal: C-level executives and business groups (e.g. business units or processes); may also include IT executives as additional participants. Equivalent of the central and state governments working together.
• IT duopoly: IT executives and one other group (e.g. business excecutives or business unit leaders)
• Anarchy: each individual user