Technology has evolved in exponential speed within this decade. Business is forced to keep up with the current technology in order to survive the competition, as IT brings many benefits. However, with great benefits also come along great efforts. Greater efforts are required in the alignment between business and IT, including in driving business innovation through the adoption of emerging technologies, organizing multiple business and technology partners on various locations, and a better focus on regulatory and audit compliance as a measure to conform to industry and corporate standards.

With this challenges in hand, CIO must put a priority on effective IT governance in their agenda in order to accelerate business growth through IT contribution.

Based on Maximizing Business Value through IT Governance by Cognizant, the followings are 5 key directives that should be on top of CIOs priorities while implementing an excellent IT governance model:

1. Align IT governance with corporate governance and business objectives.

2. Define IT governance objectives around strategic alignment, value delivery, risk management, resource management and performance management.

3. Establish holistic governance across disciplines spanning the entire IT value chain: IT strategy, architecture, project and portfolio, application lifecycle, infrastructure, data and etc.

4. Identify the appropriate IT governance control practices to help achieve IT governance objectives.

5. Establish continuous tracking, monitoring and improvement of the IT governance.

The easiest way is to start implementing IT governance with a framework that has been created by industry experts and used by thousands of organizations. Many frameworks include implementation guides to help organizations phase in an IT governance program with fewer speedbumps. The most commonly used frameworks is COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology). COBIT, published by ISACA, is a comprehensive framework of "globally accepted practices, analytical tools and models" designed for governance and management of enterprise IT. With its roots in IT auditing, ISACA expanded COBIT's scope over the years to fully support IT governance. The latest version is COBIT 5, which is widely used by organizations, focused on risk management and mitigation.

COBIT 5 is generic and useful for enterprises of all sizes, whether commercial, non-profit, or in the public sector. Below is the figure that shows of 37 governance and management processes within COBIT 5.

Implementing a successful IT governance model has never been easy. Typical challenges range from facilitating organizational change management for greater adoption, to developing processes and infrastructure to support the governance model.

To realize benefits from implementing the IT governance model, the CIO and senior IT leadership team need to invest in instilling a deep-rooted IT governance culture through effective communication, training sessions for continuous reinforcement and appropriate incentives for better compliance.

Additionally, CIOs should mandate IT functional owners to include IT governance as an integral element of their processes, and leverage governance controls in decision-making. Organizations also need to continuously invest in improving the IT governance model in response to ever-changing business and IT needs.

References :

COBIT 5-A Business Framework for the Governance and Management of Enterprise IT