IT Governance Framework:
Challenges for the
21st Century Government Leader
Donna S. Canestraro, MS, PMP
September 22, 2015
National State Auditor’s Association (NSAA) IT Conference
Hartford, CT
Our Approach
Foster public sector innovation, enhance
capability, generate public value, and
support good governance.
Policy
Government
University
Business
Management
Technology
Research-Practice Partnerships
Important
public
problems
Practitioner skill
& knowledge
Builds capability
Academic skill
& knowledge
Contributes to
research
Enhance executive
& university
education
Topics
• What is IT Governance?
– Definitional frame to ground us
– Various flavors of IT governance
– Components of IT governance
•
•
•
•
…And woven
throughout will
be stories from
our work
Why is this so hard to do?
How to address the complexity?
How do you assess the value?
How does it impact your work as you audit IT
initiatives in your state?
So what is IT Governance?
What is Governance?
The action or manor of
governing.
IT Governance
• ...is about ensuring that state government is
effectively using information technology in all lines
of business and leveraging capabilities across state
government appropriately, to not only avoid
unnecessary or redundant investments, but to
enhance appropriate cross boundary interoperability.
• The term ‘appropriate’ is used because in many
cases state government has existing statutory
constraints and bounding that can often limit as well
as empower proper governance.
• Source: NASCIO
IT Governance
IT governance (ITG) is defined as the
PROCESSES that ensure the effective and
efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to
achieve its goals.
http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/it-governance
Two Widely Quoted Definition
IT Governance is a structured way to identify not
the decisions to be made but the structure that
allows IT decisions to be made within.
Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross
IT Governance is the arrangement of authority
patterns over IT activities across an organization.
V. Sambamurthy and R. W. Zmud
14
To expand on this….
IT Governance specifies the decisions, the
rights, and the accountability framework to
encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT. IT
Governance answers the questions:
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–
–
–
What decisions must be made?
Who should make these decisions?
How will decisions be made?
What is the process for monitoring results?
Weill & Ross
Components of Governance
•
•
•
•
•
Scope
Organizational structure
Authority
Members – roles and responsibilities
Process
Scope
The scope of governance at any particular level refers to
the range of issues covered by the authority of a
governance structure.
A wide scope of governance would include most, if not
all, of the possible IT issues in a particular setting, i.e.,
procurement, standards, architecture, policies, businessIT alignment.
A more narrow one might focus solely on standards
development or procurement specifically.
Structure
• Structure refers to the bodies, committees,
groups that have the authority and process
control arrangements in a government
setting.
• Different kinds or models of governance can
exist at the same government level. IT
governance at the province level can mean a
cluster of agencies or all provincial agencies.
18
NYS Circa 2008
CS
OCIO
CIO Council
?
OFT
Parole
DOB
State
Police
GOER
?
Procurement
Service Grp.
NYS
FMS
WCB
OCFS
?
?
OSC
ATP
IJAB
CSCIC
OGS
DOCS
DCJS+
IT Investment
Board
ESHSAB
OTDA
DOL
DOH
DOH
?
Canal
Corp.
Thruway
NYS Circa 2008
CS
OCIO
CIO Council
The Big e
?
OFT
DOCS
DCJS+
DOB
State
Police
Little e’s
GOER
OGS
?
?
Procurement
Service Grp.
NYS
FMS
WCB
OCFS
?
CSCIC
OSC
ATP
IJAB
Parole
IT Investment
Board
ESHSAB
OTDA
DOL
DOH
DOH
?
Canal
Corp.
Thruway
Structure: Coordination Mechanisms
• External committees, councils, and boards
– Outside the control of the state IT office
• Enterprise-oriented units within the state IT office
– Responsible for looking across the state for
opportunities to benefit from an enterprise approach to
IT.
Structure: Coordination Mechanisms
• Communities of Practice (CoP)
– Groups formed to solve problems relevant to the
community. May be formalized within the state’s
governance structure or informal and possibly
unreported.
• Agency liaison units
– Elicit the needs of the state agencies, maintains liaisons
with each state agency or a domain-level clusters of
agencies.
Authority
• Authority arrangements identify the legitimate
ability of persons or organizational units to
control how power, rights, roles, and
responsibilities are distributed.
• The way the authority arrangements are linked
is important. They can be more hierarchical
or more network-like and often are suggestive
of how authority is distributed.
Authority arrangements
• Centralized
– All authority and decision making power in one IT
office; all IT personnel employed in that IT office.
• Decentralized
– All authority and decision-making power distributed
among individual lower-level agencies.
• Federal/hybrid
– Authority over decision-making distributed among
central organization and lower-level units.
Authority arrangements
• Strong federal/hybrid
– Formal control mechanisms (project review,
management, and oversight authority, management of
IT budgets) lie with the state IT office or external
coordination mechanism.
• Weak federal/hybrid
– Control distributed across the State CIO, state level IT
office, coordinating mechanisms, and individual
agencies.
– State IT office or external coordinating mechanism lack
full authority to enforce policies.
New York State pre 2012
50+ Data Centers
& Server Closets
72% of Large Projects
Span 5-22 Years
53+ IT Help
Desks
87% Legacy
Phone Lines
61% of Project Spend on
Consultants
53% on Siloed E-mail
14% of Workforce StaffAug Consultants
The State’s IT environment is too complex, too difficult to maintain, and increasingly difficult
to secure.
New York State Transformation 2012
Work Horizontally Across Agencies
Agency A
Core
Functions
Agency B
Core
Functions
Agency C
Core
Functions
Enterprise Shared Services
Common
Functions
Common
Functions
Common
Functions
Procurement
Real estate
Business Services
Fleet
Grants Reform
Learning Management
System
Information Technology
Services
E-licensing
Call centers
New York State Transformation 2012
Current IT Environment
Future IT Environment
Tier 3 Data Center Service
& DR Service
Consolidated Helpdesk
Converged Network
NYSeMail (Cloud)
Enterprise Identity
Management
Enterprise Data
Management
Enterprise Document
Management
Standard State-wide
Portal
The result is a more efficient, open and responsive New York State Government
Members and Roles and
Responsibilities
• Members – who are the members of
the governance structure?
– External committees, councils, and
boards
– Communities of Practice (CoP)
– Agency stakeholders
• Roles and Responsibilities – what
are their specific roles and
responsibilities?
Process
• Who convenes the meetings?
• What do they do in these meetings?
• What type of process is the “Governance
Body” responsible for?
• Implementation
• Coordination
• Decision-making
2008 Environmental Scan
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California
Florida
Kansas
Kentucky
Maine
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•
•
•
•
Michigan
Minnesota
Pennsylvania
North Carolina
Virginia
What we learned ...
• The early focus of most states was on
cost savings
– new state-wide procurement and IT
consolidation efforts.
• Through use – it became clear this
focus was insufficient to meet the
goals of more broadly based
enterprise IT governance goals.
What we learned ...
• Most are using a mixture of frameworks
and structures.
• Most had central IT offices – some
provided IT services support, development
and management and others provided both
services and policy and planning.
• Most chose hybrid/federal structure.
What we learned ...
• Formalized structures within states were similar
– Most had advisory boards of some sort.
– Most variation were found in composition, or
placement within the hierarchy and authority.
• Many use ‘coordination mechanisms’ to help
support their IT governance.
– External committees, councils, and boards
– Enterprise oriented offices, divisions or unites
– Communities of practices (those that come together
to solve a problem relevant to the community)
– Agency liaisons within central IT governance model
Critical Success Factors
• Needs to be flexible
• Acknowledge and respect to the agencies
perspective
• Clear delineation of roles, responsibilities, and
decision-making mechanisms
• Establish measurement processes
• Needs to build capacity and capability at several
levels
IT Governance:
in the eye of the beholder
Why is it so hard?
The Government Innovation Context
Technology
10,000 mph
Organization &
management
1000 mph
Public policies
10 mph
Systems thinking is . . . seeing
Interconnectedness
wholes . . . seeing
interrelationships rather than and Context Matter
things, seeing patterns of
change rather than static
. . . systems thinking
“snapshots….”.
is a sensibility —
for the subtle
interconnectedness
that gives living
systems their unique
character.
Peter Senge – 5th Discipline
Layers of complexity
Organizational
setting
Work processes &
practices
Policy, program &
economic context
Tools
What do we know
• Today’s government leaders and managers are faced
with Wicked and Tangled problems on a daily basis.
• Citizens demands for services continue to grow.
• IT resources and budgets are continually shrinking
• IT choices are among the most complex and
expensive decisions made by government leaders
today
Wicked Problems
• Broad and vague societal challenges, such as
“broken urban neighborhoods” or “reforming
public education.”
• Unstructured, cross-cutting policy areas, relentless
problems.
• Little consensus exists about how to define them,
cause and effect are unclear, and attempts to solve
them often cause them to morph into different
problems.
Weber and Khademian (2008)
Wicked Problems…
• Associated with multiple diverse
stakeholders, high levels of
interdependence, competing values, and
social and political complexity.
• They can sometimes be mitigated, but they
are never fully resolved.
Weber and Khademian (2008)
Tangled Problems
Fall in the middle ground of a continuum of
complexity and manageability, between those
that are routine and well-understood at one
end and “wicked problems” at the other.
From “Need to Know” to “Need to Share” Tangled Problems, Information Boundaries and
the Building of Knowledge Networks. S. Dawes, A Cresswell, T. Pardo
https://www.ctg.albany.edu/publications/journals/par_knowledgenetworks_may09
Tangled Problems
Plague the interconnected missions and
activities of organizations operating in the
same policy domain such as child welfare or
city planning.
They can come about as a result of the
unintended consequences of interactions
across different policy domains or
professional perspectives.
How do we address this
complexity?
Identifying the gap
These kind of problems require a kind of crossunit, cross-agency, and cross-sectoral approach
to management that is
– ill-suited to conventional bureaucratic structures,
– perceived as risky to leaders and administrators
within them, and
– often alien in its needs for cooperation in a
Madisonian system predicated on competition
rather than cooperation.
Wilson 1989
Changing landscape
• New organizational forms and interoperability
emerging as central to solution strategies.
• New political and program priorities
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Transparency
Integrated service delivery
Public value
Regional and globalization
And more
Complexity Challenges
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•
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Embeddedness
Risk
Differences among professions and roles
Centralized vs. decentralized vs. distributed
ways of working
Management Challenges
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•
•
•
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Understanding and managing complexity
Assumptions that simplify but are wrong
Contrary incentives
Competing values
Unrealistic goals, time frames, and funding
Complexity Matrix
Program
Specific
Problem-solving
Inter-governmental
Inter-organizational
Organizational
Enterprise
Capacity
Building
Assessing Value through the
Public Value Framework
The concept of public value
is not new
• What is valuable or good for society?
• What is the role of government in promoting
the good of society?
• How to ensure that value is created and
delivered by government action or policy?
Basic value-oriented questions
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•
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Value for whom?
What kind of value
What does it take to offer that value?
What to beneficiaries need to have/be/do in
order to derive the value?
• How can the value be assessed?
Value based on interests: What level?
• Personal - What’s good for me?
• Interest groups - What’s good for my group?
• Organizational or institutional - What’s good
for my town? State? Organization? Employer?
Church?
• Societal - What’s good for all of us?
Public Value is a social concept
• Value in terms of individual and group
interests – there is no absolute value
• Seldom full agreement about how to assess
value across communities or jurisdictions
• Individual interests link to institutional and
governmental forms—consider health care
reform, gun control, immigration, etc.
Government: Many Things to Many People
A common view of public
returns
The
Investment
Good
things
happen
A Better
World
Need for a New Framework
• For a way to recognize many, often competing
notions of value
• For links to an expanded investment rationale
for government
• Must incorporate understanding stakeholder
interests and value creating mechanisms
• Provide a more comprehensive model and
results, beyond financial and economic models
Core Public Value Concepts
Two major kinds of public value:
• The value that results from delivering specific
benefits directly to persons or groups
• The value to the public that results from improving
the government as a public asset
The public point of view:
• Assessing public returns should reveal value in
terms of stakeholder interests
Economic Value
income, asset values,
liabilities, entitlements,
risks to these
Social Value
family or community
relationships, social
mobility, status, identity
Quality of Life
Political Value
personal or corporate
influence on
government &
politics
Public Value Types
Strategic Value
economic or political
advantage or
Stewardship Value
opportunities, goals,
public’s view of
resources for innovation
government officials as
or planning
faithful stewards
Security, health,
recreation, personal
liberty
Ideological Value
alignment of beliefs,
moral or ethical
values with
government actions
or outcomes
Where does the value come from?
Value Generators
• Increases in efficiency
• Increases in effectiveness
• Enablement
• Intrinsic enhancements
Value Generators
A Stakeholder’s Perspective
•
Efficiency:
– Obtaining increased outputs or goal attainment with the same resources, or obtaining the
same outputs or goals with lower resource consumption.
•
Effectiveness
– Improvements in the quality and/or quantity of program results or other outputs of
government performance.
•
Intrinsic enhancements
– Changes in the environment or circumstances of a stakeholder that are valued for their own
sake.
•
Transparency
– Access to information about the actions of government officials or operation of
government programs that enhances accountability or influence on government.
•
Participation
– Frequency and intensity of direct citizens involvement in decision making about or
operation of government programs or in selection of or actions of officials.
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Collaboration
– Frequency or duration of activities in which more than one set of stakeholders share
responsibility or authority for decisions about operation, policies, or actions of
government.
A Portfolio View
Questions of interest
• By stakeholder group.
– Who is impacted by these initiatives? How are impacts distributed?
– Are we serving our most important constituencies? The right mix of
stakeholders?
• By public value type.
– Does our portfolio include all public value types desired? At the right levels?
– Are we satisfied with the balance of value in the portfolio? What’s missing?
• By agency mission, goals, and capabilities.
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Does portfolio meet our agency's strategic interests and mission?
Are we maximizing our current capabilities and tactics?
Is the value created aligned with our agency's mission?
Does the portfolio balance attention across stakeholders and interests?
Is there a balance in types and number of initiatives within programs across
the agency?
Public Value
“Public ROI is a measure of the delivery of specific value to the
people and the improvement of the value of government itself as a
public asset.”
Advancing Return on Investment Analysis
for Government IT: A Public Value Framework
The questions of interest
• What value must be created to make the
enhancement of enterprise IT governance
worthwhile?
• What kind of changes will be necessary to
deliver this value?
• Do we have the capability necessary to
implement and sustain these changes?
So, how does this translate to
your work as you audit IT
initiatives in your state?
A Closing Thought On People
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance
“I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t
one aspect of the game – it is the game”
“In the end, an organization is nothing more than the
collective capacity of its people to create value”
Louis V. Gerstner, jr.
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance (p. 182)
Thank you
www.ctg.albany.edu
dcanestr@ctg.albany.edu
Twitter
@DonnaCanestraro