The primary purpose of enterprise architecture (EA) governance is to ensure that an organization’s IT investments are closely aligned with business goals and processes, so that limited IT resources are allocated to areas of highest impact on organizational performance. While the overriding concern of EA governance is the effectiveness of the IT investments, the EA program itself needs to be governed as well, since an incorrectly developed EA could adversely impact the IT investment decisions that are based on it.

Given increasingly large, distributed, and heterogeneous application and infrastructure landscapes, standardization is getting particular attention from enterprises and their enterprise architecture management (EAM) initiatives. It has become even more essential in today’s economic times, where enterprises are forced to cut costs wherever possible. For these challenges to be overcome in an enduring way, EAM needs to build upon a defined process for managing a standards portfolio.

Standards Management: An Integral Part of EAM

The recent inclusion of “Cloud computing and Cloud/Web platforms” by Gartner in the list of top 10 disruptive technologies for 2008–2012 will continue to increase awareness of Cloud and SaaS computing solutions and offerings among enterprise IT decision makers. As James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, puts it, “If you’re a large enterprise, somebody in your organization is using Cloud computing, but they’re not telling you.” The same applies to SaaS.

Today’s CIOs face a ticking clock: Every year, according to one estimate, between one-quarter and one-third get the boot. Using the higher rate, that’s a turnover of 50 percent every 21 months. Not much of a honeymoon for them, and a deeply destabilizing fact for the rest of the organization.

What gives?

Though there are no definitive answers, IT industry watchers have identified one problem that seems to run rampant among IT leaders—a lack of “vision,” meaning long-term strategic business thinking.

Policy-based Governance Helps Security Take Its Rightful Place as Just Another Part of Your SOA Infrastructure

Haven’t we all caught ourselves thinking of security as primarily a technical problem? Recall the days when we asked, “How do I implement a PKI to secure my Web applications?” For security folks, those were the days. However, there’s been a sea change in the industry since those simpler times.

Bridging Business and IT Strategies

There are ways in which the enterprise can govern itself. No one person has to be the focal point for managing change across the enterprise. In fact, the correct way to maintain the link between business and IT strategy is through a systemic process. This article describes a governance process that provides an ongoing systemic solution to managing IT strategy and architecture blueprints at the enterprise level.

Sometimes it feels like a question of fairness. Even as technology has simplified and become almost invisible to most audiences, the complexity of maintaining technology is reaching a breaking point for information technology (IT) organizations. While digital sales and marketing channels proliferate and increase a company’s dependency on technology, little time is invested between the lines of business and IT to communicate corporate goals and how technology can support these goals.

Governance is broadly defined as the processes and systems by which an enterprise operates. How are decisions made? What are the roles and responsibilities? How does an enterprise create the logical relationship between process and IT, the architecture of the enterprise?

ARCHITECTURE GOVERNANCE

“Innovate! We need to grow!” thunders the CEO. Yet not much seems to happen. Efforts peter out, or just never really get started. Business as usual seems to remain the order of the day.

The IT leadership role has changed dramatically since the title "chief information officer" was initially coined in the late 1980s. The CIO's portfolio of responsibilities must keep pace with the rising intrinsic economic value of information. As executive recruiters and human capital strategy consultants, we at Korn/Ferry International have enjoyed a privileged vantage of the resulting evolutionary pressures affecting CIOs in leading organizations across a broad spectrum of industries.