Interesting discussion on the TOGAF course this morning. Quite a good conversation across the room kicked off by the concept of a architecture board in TOGAF. Ideally you want your most senior executives on this forum, but the point is - do they care? do they have time? Do they really understand? In an organisation like the one I work for, it's very difficult to get senior management to care about EA let alone even understand it. If we had the right type of buy-in, then getting decisions made on architectural changes should become very straight forward. I don't even know if this is strictly architecture governance issue, it's really a wider IT governance issue that helps any IT capability move forwards. So I'm left thinking - if you don't have effective IT governance how can you effectively setup architecture governance?   

A little while ago - I wrote a paper on IT Innovation for my company. This was at the request of the CFO to help facilitate a path towards IT innovation within the IS department. For the benefit of others I have posted to my blog under a dedicated page on IT Innovation.

Today I've just finishing doing the capital planning aspect of our budget round for the financial year 2011 for the IS department I work in.

The process entails consolidating and collating a lot of information, mostly from many of our technical people. The broad list of items then goes through a 3 stage process of prioritisation and refinement until we have a properly ranked and classified set of items that allow the creation of a sensible capex plan. As part of the process the EAs in my team take an initial lead on making sure the information is being put together by the stakeholders and then I get the managers across the department together to debate the relative rankings and merit of the items. Lastly once I've completed this process, the list is then handed over to our commercial manager to be turned into a document for submission to senior management.

I use a fairly extensive SharePoint list I've developed over time, plus a documented ranking process that takes into account our governance mechanisms around chargeback to our business units. I'd prefer to use some sort of portfolio tools so I could persist and manage the business rules I've built into this process over time. I could see a portfolio tool allowing quarterly updates and forcasts to be better reviewed in the light of the original financial plans.

I'm also acutely aware a lot of EAs don't get involved in processes like this - and I think they should. I personally enjoy running the process as I get a vary clear picture of where we have come from and where our investment profile is going. Especially after being involved with 3 rounds of financial planning over the last 2 and a bit years!

Questions for readers of this blog:

1. Does your financial capital planning for IS follow a similar process?
2. How detailed do you go with ranking?
3. Are your EAs involved and how heavily?
4. Do you use a portfolio management tool to do this? If so, what and why?

Absolutely fantastic article in Infoworld about why running IT as a business is a doomed strategy. There are three major statements that stand out:

1. Chargebacks are an attempt to use market forces to regulate the supply and demand for IT services. If that's the best a business can do, it means the business has no strategy, no plans, and no intentional way to turn ideas into action.
2. Nobody in IT should ever say, "You're my customer and my job is to make sure you're satisfied," or ask, "What do you want me to do?"Instead, they should say, "My job is to help you and the company succeed," followed by "Show me how you do things now," and "Let's figure out a better way of getting this done."
3. That's what proper governance requires: effective leadership.

Having had experience in a charge back / semi commercial internal IT model this article hits many issues spot on. It covers the issues created with IT being treated as a vendor in it's own organisation. Well worth it read!