More on defining IT Governance

For those of you relying on RSS feeds, some of the more interesting discussions are taking place in the Yahoo group...

Jeff Tash has responded to my post here, and his response has opened my eyes to a lack of precision in my initial post. In hindsight, I should not have implied that I consider "IT Governance" to encompass all of portfolio management, SDLC, and service management. That leaves precious little out; the concept becomes undifferentiated from simply "Enterprise IT."

However, the anonymous individual who got me posting on this was reacting in particular to my data architecture, which represents key information (on portfolio, service, and SDLC) enabling IT governance. S/he thought that even such a data architecture was out of scope for a discussion of "IT Governance," because it wasn't strictly about the decision rights. This is, more precisely, where the disagreement lies I think. I do think that any discussion of IT Governance should also be open to the question of "how do we enable it"?

Anyways, as another person on the email list pointed out, such semantic hair splitting ultimately becomes as interesting as the "pop vs. soda" debate so I'll not beat this one to death.

-ctb