Why I.T. Governance Will Remain a Top Priority in 2010

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I'm noticing that a lot more eyes seem to be on governance these days. Joe McKendrick dedicated some airtime to it in his recent "SOA in Action" blog posts and Dion Hinchcliffe just did an interesting take in his post, "A New Vision for SOA Governance: A Focus on the Social Aspect."

Hinchcliffe brings up the very human aspects of SOA that can make or break an initiative. This can be said about many IT projects that are going to have a widespread effect on a company. I.T Governance is certainly no exception, especially when you consider the old adage, ‘everybody wants governance but nobody wants to be governed.'

Of course, there have other views that don't recognize the importance of governance to the sustainability of the organization as I noted in a previous post calling out David Linthicum's erroneous assessment that cloud computing will put an end to the need to design time governance.

However, the point is that governance is moving out from behind-the-scenes to front and center as we enter the economic recovery zone. And I don't think that it's too much of a stretch to say that the recession has heightened the awareness of and greater need for governance. Here are two main reasons why:

1. Mergers and acquisitions: the speed and size of the recent M&A deals, especially the market consolidation in the financial services sector, is requiring IT efficiently integrate various back-end systems in an effort to accelerate the creation of newly formed entities. With so much at risk, it makes sense that best practices and governance policies are adhered to during the extensive integration process.

2. Cloud computing: with all of the recent debates about the risks associated with cloud computing as outlined in the InformationWeek article, "Don't Rush to Cloud Computing," there are still many companies and government agencies that are adopting the cloud as part of their IT strategy. Governance can help reduce this risk, especially when it's introduced at design time, so that applications and services are based on more solid foundations before they are extended to a cloud environment.

As the IT industry prepares for recovery, most recently forecasted by industry analysts at Forrester citing that hardware and software will bounce back in 2010, governance will very likely continue to be a focal point. 

While the road to recovery will continue to be a bumpy ride, I'm looking forward to it.