Digital Governance – building an organisation to support increased business dynamics and allowing for innovation and proactivity
The IT Governance Institute’s has a clear definition of IT governance. The key elements are: “… leadership, organizational structures and processes to ensure that the organization’s IT sustains and extends the organization’s strategies and objectives”.
Infocom Group’s approach to digital governance is based on conducting transformation to increase dynamics. Hence, in the digital era we should focus on the word ‘extend’ in the definition above, broadening the concept of governance from ensuring control to enabling leadership.
Infocom Group’s view is that digital governance should span broader than just IT. On the corporate level it is about introducing principles for trust-based, visual leadership and implementing formal and unformal feedback loops throughout the organization. A cornerstone will be the alignment of business and IT through scaling agile from team level to portfolios and eventually to the whole enterprise. Such processes should also include new perspectives on methodologies for business prioritizing expanding value assessment from pure ROI to include elements like the value of having and developing options.
Further key elements in digital governance cover areas like value stream analysis to organize according to value creation, aligning internal IT-roles and responsibilities with an optimal DevOps topology and also focusing on removing organizational debt to extend business options
Digital governance thus encompasses the following:
- Principles for digital leadership
- Business ownership and prioritization methodologies
- Strategy and objectives for the IT function and the role of IT in a digital business
- Opening the silos to allow for cross-functional teams and value stream-oriented work
- IT policies – balancing standardization with flexibility within the IT production lines
- Management and control of IT COSTs
- Moving internal control and regulatory requirements from work-consuming manual report to automated functions
- Supplier management and follow-up
Defining a digital governance is the first step. Implementing new leadership principles, new responsibilities and new ways of working require a transformational approach to the current organization. Infocom Group’s extensive experience in organizational change management and change processes will ensure a smooth transition from the traditional business – IT division of responsibilities to a digital company.