Governance from the top down: When Your Leaders KnowWhat They Want

Governance structures that drive hard at the process level gain theirpower from clear IT strategies at the top. Without guidance fromsenior executives, process-level projects have a tendency to multiplyor become neglected and unfocusedor, worst of all, simplyirrelevant.

"The single most important IT governance decision you can make isgetting senior management to identify three or four or five strategic,core business processes and then decide which ones they want to focustheir IT spending on, because then everything else kind of falls inplace from there," says Jeanne W. Ross, principal research scientistat the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. "These companiesget so much better value from IT than the companies that say, OK, hereare all the IT project proposals that were submitted this year, let'sdecide which ones have the highest ROIROI and allocate the dollarsaccordingly." Alles zu ROI auf CIO.de

At State Street Corp., the Boston-based bank, IT knows which coreprocesses to focus on because the company has an IT supergroup, the ITexecutive committee, devoted to talking about them 12 times a year.All of the heads of the different business units, along with thepresident and COO, sit at the table. The IT budget, which used to becontrolled almost entirely by State Street's highly independentbusiness units, is now in the committee's hands. The committee focusesprimarily on IT investments, but it also discusses business strategyand the role of IT in supporting it, as well as IT-specific issueslike security and architecture. The different units still have theirown discretionary budget, and quite a bit of power to determine theirown IT destinies, but they all know that the IT executive committee isthere to serve the interests of the company as a whole, which rightnow is focused on improving customer service across all the businessunits. John Fiore, who developed State Street's governance structureas CIO, left the company last month. His successor, Joseph Antonellis,who assisted Fiore in creating the structure, says he will maintainit. "I strongly believe in the governance and the ideals that [Fiore]put in place," he says.