As you may know, my colleague Craig Symons and I have started an initiative to refurbish our research agenda on business technology (BT) governance. Our intention is to develop a collection of documents on “good” IT governance practices for CIOs. The research is based on facts and findings gathered through interviews with leading practitioners, case studies, survey questions, reviews of popular and state-of-the-art methodologies, and our long standing industry experience. This blog post provides you with an overview of our assumptions, the current initiative’s status, what kind of questions we have answered so far, and what we plan next. Your feedback, questions, and recommendations are warmly welcome!

We are building the research on a few basic assumptions: BT governance and “good” IT governance are the same. We define them as a conscious effort by senior executives to establish strategies, structures, processes, and measurements for the management of technology to boost business results. We assumed also that the current wave of tech innovation affects not only how information workers and IT departments manage devices and services but also how business executives evaluate, drive, and monitor IT-related decisions.

At this stage, we have verified our assumptions through interviews with governance and industry experts and reviewed several consulting engagements and case studies. We have also launched a global survey, which we invite you to take. 

After publishing the first document in our new collection a few weeks ago — “The Future Of Business Technology Governance” — we completed the drafts of three methodology documents last week: “The What And How Of BT Decision-Making”; its sister document, “The Who Of BT Decision-Making”; and “The BT Governance Maturity Model.” Please stay tuned for their publication in the course of October 2012. The questions we have addressed so far are:

1)      How do existing practices for IT governance need to change under the impact of technology innovations such as mobile, social, business analytics, BPM, and cloud?

2)      What BT governance capabilities (i.e., processes, roles, and structures) are required to make BT governance work?

3)      How do you assess the maturity of these capabilities?

4)      What is the best strategy for changing/improving IT governance when moving to BT?

During the next three months, we will add two more documents to our collection. The first one summarizes practitioners’ views. As already mentioned, we have recently interviewed several top experts from leading consultancies and service management firms. We plan to summarize their insights into a recommendations document. The second document will focus on BT governance performance measurements and communications.

Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or recommendations. Watch also for more details around our initiative in the coming days. Thank you!