A research conducted by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) revealed that, in 2022, 84.7% of medium and large-sized companies use advanced digital technology in their operations, with cloud computing (73.6%) being the most prominent, followed by the Internet of Things (48.6%).
This data shows that the business landscape has become increasingly dependent on automation models and various algorithms. For companies to succeed, areas such as IT governance become fundamental.
This is because, with IT governance, it becomes easier to ensure the management, control, and optimization of information technology resources, reinforcing the value of the IT department for the company. If you are interested and want to learn more about the pillars, benefits, and how to implement IT governance, just follow the article!
What is IT governance?
IT governance is a set of processes and practices aimed at ensuring the alignment of the Information Technology (IT) department with other sectors of a company. For this, the set of IT governance practices guides corporate management in making strategic decisions.
In this way, the IT department of an organization can stay aligned with the company’s strategic objectives, optimizing the use of IT resources and better managing the risks of applications, systems, and hardware used in all sectors.
IT governance is guided by various pillars, such as strategic alignment, risk management, resource management, and value management. These pillars help managers keep the information technology area running in accordance with the company’s norms and policies. Throughout the content, we will delve into how these pillars work.
What are the pillars of IT governance?
To be able to align the information technology area with the organization’s needs, IT governance has some pillars. Check it out:
Strategic alignment
A fundamental step for the success of IT governance, strategic alignment ensures that the IT area acts in accordance with business needs, taking into account its norms, policies, and objectives.
Thus, truly effective and high-value solutions for business development can be planned by those responsible for IT governance.
Value delivery
Another important pillar for IT governance is value delivery. Here is the moment to ensure that investments made in the IT area are, in fact, aligned with the area’s activities, business objectives, and stakeholder expectations.
With this, it is necessary for the information technology area to present tangible, quality results that effectively benefit the company.
Risk management
Risk management is important for identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks related to information technology activities. For this, those responsible need to develop a plan and carry out a comprehensive analysis to identify potential risks that can affect security, system performance, and reliability, for example.
Once this is done, it is the role of governance to communicate the risks to the company, developers, and customers. This pillar is fundamental to correcting possible risks identified with quick adjustments and ensuring the prevention of further damage.
Resource management
Resource management within IT governance refers to the responsibility of managing the budget of the information technology department to ensure the delivery of services within the expected spending limit set by the organization.
Aspects related to resource management include human resources, i.e., recruitment, development, and retention of talent, investment in hardware, software hiring, network usage, among others.
Performance measurement
Evaluating performance is an essential pillar in IT governance because it is through measuring results that it becomes possible to assess the effectiveness of strategies and ensure that the team is delivering what is expected by the company.
For this, many use key performance indicators (KPIs) and various orchestration methods that, when aligned with the company’s strategies, help measure performance, enabling the identification of trends, patterns, and areas for improvement.
Benefits of Implementing IT
Governance Adopting IT governance in your company can bring numerous advantages. Check out the main ones below:
Cost reduction
The costs of your company can be significantly reduced by implementing IT governance. This is because this area aims to optimize the use of resources, avoiding unnecessary costs, and eliminating redundant processes. In addition, a well-structured IT governance focuses on simplifying and automating processes, eliminating possible delays, and reducing the time spent on certain activities. In other words, IT governance can map processes in the information technology area and achieve the best results.
Improvement in quality
Complementing cost reduction, the improvement in quality arises with IT governance as strategic planning brings greater productivity to the company. This is because IT governance is responsible for analyzing the best ways to perform company activities using the benefits of technology.
For example, it is the responsibility of IT governance to verify if it is possible to automate business processes with tools such as RPA and BPM. In this way, many repetitive tasks manually performed by developers can be carried out by robots with the adoption of automation software.
As a result, there will be an improvement in quality and results with fewer human errors, reallocation of workforce to higher-value projects, and consequently, a reduction in operational costs, as robots can perform the same tasks in less time.
💡Learn more: RPA for IT: benefits, examples, and how to implement
Information Security
IT governance also assists in the information security of a company, as it is responsible for implementing policies and security mechanisms in IT. In addition, it is up to IT governance to organize security training for the team, ensuring that everyone is aware of the adopted guidelines.
Finally, IT governance is responsible for ensuring that the company’s security practices comply with existing laws and regulations, such as the LGPD (General Data Protection Law), for example.
More Innovation
Finally, IT governance has the strategic function of driving innovation in a company. This benefit can be achieved through the research and evaluation of new technologies and innovative practices to be implemented in the corporate environment.
It is important that IT governance always seeks to update itself on new technologies and market frameworks. In this way, your company can remain competitive in an industry that undergoes constant changes.
How to implement IT governance?
There are IT governance frameworks that guide the implementation of the area in the company. Frameworks are ready-made models that your company can follow to assist in the implementation process of IT governance. Get to know the most used ones:
COBIT
COBIT, acronym for Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies, acts as a management and IT governance framework. It provides a set of practices, guidelines, and organizational strategies to help companies achieve their objectives.
The framework provides specific details on how IT governance can carry out its activities. Additionally, it identifies the KPIs for each process, helping companies measure the success of each process.
ITIL
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a framework that encompasses a set of efficient practices and concepts that assist IT governance. The tool defines organizational functions to ensure that activities are carried out effectively, including Service Desk and Problem Management.
The tool is considered a library of best practices, that is, it is a set of flexible guidelines that organizations can adapt according to their needs.
PMBOK
Finally, PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) serves as a guide for IT governance. It contains widely recognized and used project management best practices.
PMBOK contributes to professionalism in project management by providing standards and guidelines to assist in performing work effectively.
IT Governance and IT Management
Despite being related, the concepts of IT governance and IT management have crucial differences and play important roles within an organization.
IT governance, as we’ve seen, has the role of aligning IT activities with the objectives of other areas of the company through a set of practices that ensure the effective use of IT resources.
In other words, IT governance operates more strategically, taking into account the company’s norms and policies.
On the other hand, IT management is responsible for the practical and operational implementation of IT activities, ensuring that the strategies determined by IT governance are executed properly.
Its activities include project management, technical support, system development, and infrastructure maintenance.
💡Learn more: What is IT orchestration and main tools
Ready to improve IT governance in your company?
We hope this content has been helpful in clarifying your doubts about IT governance. Remember that implementing this area in your company can bring numerous benefits.
If you want to optimize your business processes and be recognized for boosting governance in your company, using RPA for orchestrating IT automations and applications can be a great option.
With the BotCity RPA orchestrator, you can boost the efficiency of code automations in an integrated way, creating and orchestrating automations from the simplest to the most complex across different systems, applications, infrastructures, and devices.
So, schedule a conversation with our experts or, if you want to try the BotCity code assistant and orchestrator on your own, feel free to create a free account!
