Datasheet

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over a few key governance dimensions, such as enterprise architecture,
planning and budgeting oversight, configuration management, and IT oper-
ations readiness. Organizations with baseline competencies in some form of
governance will have a far easier time adopting or extending these to SOA
governance, while those without a basic governance foundation will suffer
mightily to add SOA governance disciplines to their enterprise.
IT GOVERNANCE APPROACHES
IT governance is still an immature discipline for the most part, despite
the IT management frameworks mentioned above. One of the more insight-
ful IT governance approaches was developed by Peter Weill and Jeanne
Ross in their book IT Governance.
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Weill and Ross provide an excellent,
high-level perspective of IT governance by simplifying IT governance down
to five key decisions and six IT governance constructs. Weill and Ross define
IT governance as follows:
IT governance: Specifying the decision rights and accountability
framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT.
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Weill and Ross essentially focus IT governance on five key decisions:
1. IT Principles. Codifying the role of IT in supporting the business
through fundamental IT principles that help with alignment and deci-
sion making.
2. IT Architecture. Defining enterprise integration and technology stand-
ardization requirements. (We prefer to treat this category of governance
as EA, and expand the definition to include the business architecture,
application architecture, technology/infrastructure architecture, and
the information architecture.)
3. Infrastructure Requirements. Determining shared and enabling tech-
nology services, such as data centers, networks, telecommunications,
desktops, and computing capacity, that are required by the enterprise.
4. Business Application Needs. Specifying the business need for commer-
cial off-the-shelf or internally developed IT applications, as well as the
ownership, support, and maintenance for these business applications.
5. IT Investment and Prioritization. Determining what initiatives, pro-
grams, and projects to fund and how much to spend. These decisions
are made during the annual strategic planning processes, as well as dur-
ing the execution year. This process also includes adding and cancelling
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