Wikibon Blog

Cloud adoption among larger organizations is also commonplace and becoming more so.  It’s evident that the cloud—however one decides to define the term—is and remain a significant player when it comes to the directions that organizations take to meet new business needs.

Cloud services create a new paradigm when it comes to managing and acquiring IT services in an organization.  They create a whole new world of accessibility, which the business can embrace quickly, easily and, sometimes, inexpensively.  At first glance, one would believe that the pot of gold has been delivered and an organization needs simply to avail itself of the cloud-based spoils to thrust the organization to new heights.  In fact, one may wonder why there needs to be a CIO or IT function at all.  After all, if the individual business units can just buy services on their own, that seems to be the best of the options, right?

All is not as it seems.

It’s at times like this when the governance structure of the organization is more important than ever.  Traditionally, new technology services didn’t flow like a fire hose into the organization.  As such, loose governance or only informal governance, while not ideal, could be sufficient to meet organizational needs as they related to service intake.  Often, such governance would involve the CIO and a few people from the business in conjunction with a senior leadership team that occasionally reviewed new initiatives.  This kind of structure is not uncommon.

Today, though, with the fire hose starting to blast at full, informal or lackadaisical governance structures simply don’t cut it anymore.  Too much can happen to quickly and the stakes are high.  There are serious negative ramifications that can result from poorly implemented cloud services, including:

• Service overlap.
• Lack of comprehensive integration with existing processes.
• Disintegration of data and the creation of new, discrete islands of data, leading to poor or ineffective decision-making.

When organizations simply attempt to accept the fire hose of new services, existing integration groups become overwhelmed and efforts become less successful, leading to the effects indicated above.

How can companies avoid the fire hose effect?  The simple answer is to implement strong governance structures and techniques that place a focus squarely on ensuring that only the technology projects and services that meet critical and agreed upon business goals are the ones that are selected for implementation.  It must be remembered that technology resources exist to serve the needs of the organization as a whole and the initiatives undertaken and supported by these resources must meet overall organizational needs, not perceived, unvetted needs or individual unit needs… unless those individual unit needs have been identified as the target of the efforts.

A good technology governance model will include key stakeholders and business decision makers from across the organization.  While it’s expected that people will argue for individual areas, the people selected should have the ability to see the bigger organizational picture.  Policies will exist that govern the acquisition of new technology services, including cloud-based services that might be purchased by individual business units.  Further, the CIO or a designee should be required to be involved in all service acquisitions in order to make sure that selected products maintain process and data integrity.  Most important, technology governance requires executive-level attention on an ongoing basis.  This doesn’t mean that the CEO needs to turn into the CIO, but the CEO should have awareness.

The technology governance structure should act as the control valve to manage—at a very high level—the influx of demand so that what trickles down to implementation staff that is responsible for integrating disparate services can do so in a controlled way.  Personally, I believe that this is a make or break function for organizations as they move forward with “centralized decentralization” of their technology efforts.