Very interesting and diverse set of comments this week.  Did you notice how quickly the nice orderly world of ISACA  (basic and admin controls, enterprise architecture, strategy and steering teams and RACI  charts) became chaotic? There is an important point here, its called POLITICS.  Not the nation-state kind, nor necessarily the back stabbing kind.  The best definition I know of politics is “Who gets what, when, where, why and how.”   You can go into an organizatio, find its IT strategy, find a steering team and apparently they are doing the right things.  But, until you understand who the members are, what interests they represent, which groups have more power than others, you will not really know what is going on.  The Weill and Rose article should open your eyes to some of the possibilities.

The other thing I want you to take away from IT strategy is that implementing it is a political exercise.  Yes, having a great plan based on an excellent enterprise architecture is important, but you need to get it accepted throughout the organization.  This means you need to get buy in from anyone who is  in a position to shut you down.  You need to get all the other players to understand, buy in, and support you when things go wrong. This will involve a lot of skills that IT people are not usually known for.  There are likely to be difficult negotiations, private lobbying, dramatic speeches, and lots of grass roots communicating.  Good CIO’s have these skills and have probably used them to define a comfortable status quo with the rest of the organization.  As an auditor, you may find a problem that has the potential to upset that status quo and hence threaten the CIO.  Be aware.

Readings

1. What are the five IT questions that Weill & Ross see all organizations make?  Why shouldn’t IT management answer these questions?  If not IT management, who?
2. Which archetype do you think is the most rare? Most common? Why?
3. What is the difference between and IT Strategy committee and an IT Steering Committee?

The Enterprise-Wide Business-IT Engagement Case

Think about these questions as you prepare for Tuesday’s discussion:

1. What are the issues Stefaan faced? What were the issues with the way IT development worked?
2. Look at Exhibit 5. What governance instruments did Stefaan address? What are the pro’s and con’s of what they did?
3. If you were Stefaan, how would you describe your accomplishments and path forward?