Governance
The set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that control how an organization’s business divisions and IT teams work together to achieve its goals. Every organization has unique needs and goals that influence its approach to governance. Larger organizations will probably require more – and more detailed – governance than smaller organizations. A good governance plan can:
- Streamline the deployment of products and technologies, such as SharePoint.
- Help keep your organization’s system secure and compliant.
- Help ensure the best return on your investment in technology.
A general warning!
If you’re looking for simplicity, that is not what we can provide.
Governance in the relation between IT and Processes is about finding a balance in conflicting goals. The ambition is to make it controllable. We try to make it a simple as possible but we cannot go beyond that level. And… we need to control the entire elephant. We cannot escape into a mere partial beast.
It takes skills, endurance, the will to listen to each other, and to read the body language of the beast.
This is not a new methodology!
This is an operational approach to standards and methodologies like:
- ITIL 4
- Cobid 5
- ISO 9000
Baked Air Solutions and added value
I see it as my strength to bundle forces. Arranging the entire specter of end-user demand to the realization of performing, cost-effective, and intuitive solutions. It’s always more than the sum of all parts.
4 pillars of governance.
- IT; emphasizing on tooling and infrastructure.
- Rules: Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Security. Conditions that come from the outside world.
- Content & Business Logic; providing an optimal support during the content life-cycle.
- Adoption; make sure that people use what’s provided properly and organize demand. 20% is IT and 80% is behavior.
These projects are almost always from an IT incentive. “Hé, it’s in a computer, and that’s why IT needs to fix it.”
That’s not true, though. IT has the supplier role in this model, and the sole reason they provide an IT infrastructure is that there is business demand.
IT also has a significant role in the governance discussion, and they too bring rules (boundaries) into the discussion to which the business must comply.
The business owns process logic and content. They hold a demanding role in an organization.
You also need people from "internal communications".
When you bring functional governance in place, it will lead to technical discussions, and everyone around the table will start talking IT jibberish. People from the internal communications department must focus on translating these design decisions into understandable expressions.
An Elephant Sandwich
Sometimes you are assigned to a task that is so big, that you don’t know where to start and how to proceed. People refer to these projects as Elephant Sandwiches. How can you devour a McDjumbo Elephant Sandwich?
Do not eat everything at once.
- Go for one leg after the other and once you are used to chunks in the size of legs, then tails, tears, and even trunks are actually quite easy.
- When you have eaten 1 leg, then you can go for the other 3, or it’s time to eat the head.
- The next step is to start nibbling on the belly. It might take you a few weeks but in the end, you’ve devoured the entire Elephant.
- Forget about the lettuce and the bun. It’s stale by the time you did the Elephant.
One way or the other; you still have the obligation to devour the whole elephant. So the main message might be: Don’t eat an Elephant Sandwich all by your lonesome; get help!
The approach
The relation between processes and IT.
Please take some time and read the entity-relationship diagram, and start reading from the middle; from the process.
A process is only a process when it transforms the input into an output. This enrichment is executed by either human actors or machines/ IT services. Most of the time it’s a combination of people working with machines. The result of machine/ IT labor is represented as a service. In the ideal world, these services are based on use cases.
- Use cases are the fundamental building blocks of functional solution design. They represent the agreement between demand and supply roles in the process. These use cases define a service and they often are based on a number of user stories.
- User stories are individual statements by representations of user roles (personas) that can be of help in aggregation to use cases. It’s a format/ or template for a business analyst in “talking to business”.
An IT service is the result of combining configuration items (parts of IT) and this design is called a solution architecture.
When configuration items are custom assembled/ build this process is supported by a technical design. There is no need to make a technical design for out-of-the-box configuration items. If needed the information can be provided by the supplier.
Organizing the processes
Top of the business process pyramid
This page contains a variety of modeling techniques. Each technique is selected for specific use or audiences.
The Entity Relation Diagram ERD as shown above describes core concepts in a data structure and how they relate. The lines that connect them describe cardinality 1:0, N:1, 1:1, etc.
Audience: developers and data modelers.
The other diagram with the 4 diagonal black boxes is an IDEF Ø model describes communication (agreements) through a process structure.
Audience: business management, quality officers.
People love hierarchy
IT might say that they are at the head of the food chain or in the center of the model.
To get the true value of the model, you can download the pdf file of the model.
- Make sure you have clean hands and maybe some band aids.
- Take the scissors, and cut out the model.
- Gently fold all lines and make sure that the colored triangles are facing outward.
- Put some glue on the white extensions and connect the white strips to the back sides of the colored triangles.
- Let it dry for a moment
- Watch the pyramid and decide which element is the core (or most important).
