IT Governance for IPO - How? Who? What?

IPOs need even more scrutiny about corporate governance than established public companies. These private companies are often reluctant to put aside the privileges of being private in order to become a public firm. In the long run, the best IPOs have a shareholder-friendly corporate IT governance structure. That is why corporate governance is one of the four factors that go into Renaissance Capital's rating system.

In the context of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), governance is an often-misunderstood term. Some people use the term SOA Governance to mean service lifecycle governance—that is, governing the lifecycle of services from creation through deployment. Others take it to mean applying runtime policies to services. But is there more to SOA governance than this? And, without a common understanding of what governance means, are organizations that adopt SOA simply setting themselves up for failure?

I believe, that governance with SOA should ultimately be about delivering on your business and SOA objectives. It must link SOA investments to business goals and initiatives, mitigate the risks associated with SOA, and fit into the context of an organization’s overall IT Governance framework.

According to Peter Weill, of MIT defines IT governance as "specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT.” In other words, IT managers must use decisions, processes, and policies to encourage the behavior that contributes to success. The IT Governance Institute expands this definition to include “….leadership and organizational structures and processes that ensure that the organization’s IT sustains and extends the organization’s strategies and objectives.” In the case of SOA adoption, SOA Governance can be defined as the interaction between policies (what), decision-makers (who), and processes (how) in order to ensure SOA success.

This definition of governance implies that you need to have a SOA strategy, ensure that it’s aligned with where your business is going, and develop a concrete idea of what you expect from your SOA investments. In order to deliver on these expectations, and as part of your SOA strategy, you need a plan that we refer to as the SOA Roadmap, which outlines the projects to be implemented with SOA and, the capabilities that need to be put into place over a period of time (such as two to five years), to ensure that you deliver on your business and SOA strategy. By incrementally building the required capabilities over a period of time, you can increase your SOA maturity, thereby enabling you to deliver more projects in a more efficient and change-resilient way.

To ensure SOA success, you should enact policies and supporting processes that support the delivery of the SOA Roadmap. You should communicate them widely, and then monitor their implementation and make adjustments as you go. This is the essence of governance with SOA—enacting policies and procedures to ensure the timely and appropriate execution of your SOA Roadmap. So if governance with SOA is about decisions, processes, and policies, “What kinds of policies do you need to put into place? And to what do those policies need to be applied?”

Enacting policies and procedures to ensure the timely and appropriate execution of your SOA Roadmap is the essence of Governance with SOA.

Processes (How?); Decisions (Who?); Policies (What?)

Governance with SOA Addresses

• What decisions must be made for effective management
• Who should make those decisions and who has input rights
• How the decisions will be agreed on and implemented