A look into IT Governance and today’s trends

In today’s IT world, there are many challenges that knock IT leaders’ offices every day. The trends are changing fast and staying behind others is not an option. But who really drives to change? Business or technology?

 

This might be a dilemma question for some people as there is no single answer for this question. But there should be kind of best practices, and the field of IT Governance is an area of interest for people who might want to go deeper about this topic.

Karen Schwartz defines IT Governance as “it’s putting structure around how organizations align IT strategy with business strategy, ensuring that companies stay on track to achieve their strategies and goals, and implementing good ways to measure IT’s performance”. (CIO.com, 2007)

 

Frameworks like ITIL, ISO/IEC 38500 and COBIT are the main used ones in the industry.

 

All this is fine, but who really drives technology changes in the enterprise? I am emphasizing on this question because I can see that most of the time stakeholders watch technology, wait for a while before adapting it, and then they start to implement it in their environments. But how long should we wait before we implement the technology, and here I will put my opinion on the matter.

 

An IT leader should always be ready to follow all these fast trends and he has to have an eager approach to monitor the technology. The more important will be a leader with a mind that can see behind walls, which means here that can imagine how a certain technology can affect the business, do the analysis of effects, and finally translate that into a strong business case if he sees the potential.

This is not a literature approach of phrasing technical words to write an article, but something I can give examples to prove it.

Let us take Big Data in health sector; Big Data can go far away in changing the way Hospitals, Clinics, doctors used to work with their patients by having all the information formulated in patterns. I advise readers to have a look on some articles about the topic here:

http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/the-rise-of-big-data-in-hospitals-opportunities-behind-the-phenomenon.html

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/02/05/forbes-healthcare-summit-using-big-data-to-make-patients-better/

 

http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/electronic-medical-records/7-big-data-solutions-try-to-reshape-heal/240144641

 

We can find similar analogy with other technologies with different fields such as cloud and mobile technologies.

The key point is how technical people would represent the solutions to business executives that control budgets. So I can say a sales and marketing spirit should exist in the IT crowd to prove their points, in order to prevent from staying behind that could cause them later to really work hard to just come again to the surface after abandoning the progress.

 

Technology will keep going at the same fast pace and same should be the IT Leaders. We should know how to deal with the psychology of “Fear of Change” that is a common for human beings. Technology should always offer new perspective to business and not just be a decorative part of the compound named enterprise.

In conclusion, I would say technology experts should keep analyzing business needs, transform it into new concepts, then market it to become an enterprise standard.

 

I am really interested to hear feedback on this post please don’t hesitate to comment or contact me to discuss.