Enterprise Architecture Knowledge Digest

Called 'part entertaining novel and part enlightening textbook' by reviewers, FruITion is about Ian the CIO. How will Ian as the CIO react when the management team explores a very different relationship with IT? The strategy that emerges has major implications for the CIO and everyone in the IT department.

Raf Cammarano: The word 'governance' is getting a pretty bad reputation as bureaucratic red tape getting in the way of people trying to 'do stuff'. It's seen as a barrier to innovation. I take the opposite view. I think that governance promotes innovation. In fact, its essential to innovation.

Serge Thorn: Finally IT Governance will be recognised as a standard. We already had a series of ISO standards for various IT Governance domains such as IT Service Management ISO 20000, Security Management ISO 27001, and Quality ISO 9000, but recently the international organization recognized that a new standard would be well accepted. It will be named ISO 38500 which will cover Corporate Governance of information technology. This standard was originally defined as an Australian standard AS8015, which by the way was the only alternative available.

The Information Technology Assurance Framework (ITAFTM) is a comprehensive and good-practice-setting model that: Provides guidance on the design, conduct and reporting of IT audit and assurance assignments

By Dave Greenfield, InformationWeek. December 8, 2007. ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 17799 provide a blueprint for managing IT services. It's long been accepted that constant change is fundamental to IT. While most IT pros understand that change is part of the game, the organizations they support often resist it or have a hard time understanding why IT operates under the strictures it does. CIOs must be prepared to overturn accepted norms in the pursuit of innovation. Finessing those changes means more than just leadership skills or charisma. It calls for having a clear blueprint as to the direction of the organization and its goals.

David Weinberger, Fellow Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School. Governance, as an explicit social structure, codified and implemented, arises when tacit governance fails. At its best, explicit governance is a response to a breakdown. It rarely restores a society to its prior, unbroken state.

bITa Center's Unifying Process Framework, UPF, is a process unifying framework that aligns not only the domains within IT together but also aligns IT with the business. The UPF is a business framework that is generic to businesses and applies across all sectors commercial and public. It is naturally used by IT where it is part of a business, or by IT if it operates in a market where it is servicing a number of businesses on a commercial basis. The UPF proposed in this series of articles will help bridging differences between the IT management domains and forster cooperation between the people working in the different domains. There are four dimensions to IT business process within the overall UPF framework. Those dimensions are explained in a series of articles. In summary they are The Core IT Governance Dimension, The Core IT Value Chain Dimension, The Support Dimension, and The Enabling Dimension.