Hi, thanks for joining me. My name is Christopher Locheadand I'm the chief marketing officer at Mercury and today we're going to talkabout what Gartner calls one of the top five issues, which is IT governance.
Now the question is, why is IT governance such a hot issuetoday? Well, it really comes down to three critical things. The first one is,how do we get better control over IT? IT plays a seminal role in automating allof the critical functions of a business today and getting return and makingsure that IT's delivering business value is critical.
The second issue is, our compliance has emerged as a hugeissue around the world, especially with new regulations coming from thegovernment like Sarbanes-Oxley. There is a straight line between the chairman'soffice and the CIO's office because to comply with something like SOX, you'vegot to modify business processes. And today, about 90% of key businessprocesses, especially financial ones, are automated in software. So complianceinitiatives by default become IT initiatives.
And the last is this notion of alignment. How do we alignthe goals, the resources, and ultimately the results of IT with what thebusiness is trying to achieve and that's really what IT governance is about. Sohow does this work? You've got the business up here and the business makesstrategic request of IT to do things and that creates demand on IT resources. Sofor example, the VP of sales shows up in the CIO's office and says, "Wewant to reach a broader market and we want to sell more of our product on theInternet that creates demand for new applications on the Internet to sellstuff." The CFO shows up in the CIO's office and says, "We need tomodify, for example, our SAP systems to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, more demandon IT."
The next is, we need to manage the entire portfolio ofprojects that IT is working on what's called "project and portfoliomanagement" and what this is about is specifically managing the people,the priorities, the projects, and the processes-- all the Ps within IT anddoing it in a broad way. If you have these two things, first of all, you havevisibility in everything you've been asked to do and everything you'recurrently doing. From there, the CIO can sit down witha line of businessexecutive and make strategic trade-offs and what the real priorities are and do"what-if" analysis. So for example, if we do this new Sarbanes-Oxleyinitiative, what is the impact going to be on, let's say for example, CRMrollout that we're currently working on? The last phase of this is called"change management," which is how do we govern the process by whichnew IT services, new applications are rolled out into production? Who signs offon it? Who agrees that the project is done? Has business analysis done to makesure that what we ask for in demand is actually what we're going to get inchange management, so that ultimately when new IT applications and services getrolled out, we deliver that all important business value. So leading ITexecutives are adopting best practices and software applications to optimize ITgovernance to gain the control, to roll out compliance initiative, andultimately to align IT back to the business.
