Governance from the bottom up: When You HaveMultiple Business Units

Of course, in the real world, companiesespecially big ones withmultiple business unitsrarely have consistent business strategies. At3M, for example, there are six market centers and 45 units, all withdifferent strategies and market conditions. Drew needs to tie them alltogether with a single governance structure that serves the uniqueneeds of each business while somehow maintaining consistency acrossthe units and building support for a unified IT strategy across thecompany.

To do that, Drew has developed a governance structure that promotesthe IT goals of 3M as a wholestandardization, cost savings and ROIatthe functional and business unit levels of the company.

Drew's governance structure starts at the bottom, at the businessprocess level. Each of the six business divisions must keep a runninglist of "e-productivity" projects, which identify a specific businessprocess (such as order management or customer service) whose cost,quality and speed can be improved by IT. Leaders in the business unitschoose the projects and champion them, with IT in a supporting role.Each business division has a quarterly cost-reduction dollar target,and the projects are reviewed to see if the goals are being met. Ifthey aren't, the business unit leadership has to explain itself to thetop executives. That pushes the units to become more accountable forIT projects and to devote the resources necessary to help Drew's staffget the job done. Of course, Drew also measures his own staff on itsability to drive those projects to success. If the projects look likethey might be transferrable across more than one business unit, theybecome "Super E's" and get bumped up to the corporate level.

The governance mechanism that Drew uses to keep these projects ontrack and in line with 3M's corporate goals for IT is the enterprisearchitecture, the CIO's secret weapon. Each e-productivity projectmust adhere to a list of common applications, hardware and programminglanguages. In this way, Drew is gradually pushing the differentdivisions toward a common architecture without having to issue a fiatfrom above.