What are the best ways to measure IT governance policies in your IT culture?

1 Define your IT governance objectives

In order to measure your IT governance policies, you first need to define what you want to achieve with them. Your objectives should be in line with your business strategy, vision, and values, and should reflect the expectations and needs of customers, employees, and partners. Common objectives include enhancing IT value delivery and customer satisfaction, improving IT risk management and compliance, optimizing IT resource allocation and utilization, fostering IT innovation and agility, and supporting IT change and transformation. Additionally, you should create SMART indicators and targets for each objective such as IT ROI/TCO, SLAs/KPIs, risk exposure/mitigation plans, portfolio balance/alignment, project success rate/maturity level.

2 Assess your IT governance maturity

Once you have defined your IT governance objectives and indicators, assessing your current IT governance maturity level can help you identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement in your IT governance policies and practices. There are various frameworks and models that you can use to assess your IT governance maturity, such as the COBIT 5 maturity model, the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) maturity model, and the IT-CMF maturity model. Self-assessment tools, surveys, audits, interviews, or external consultants are all viable options for conducting an IT governance maturity assessment. It is also beneficial to benchmark your results against industry standards and best practices, as well as compare them with your desired outcomes.

3 Monitor and report your IT governance metrics

After you have assessed your IT governance maturity level, it is important to monitor and report your IT governance metrics on a regular basis. This will help track progress and performance, as well as communicate results and value to stakeholders. To do this, you should use a balanced scorecard approach that covers four perspectives: financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth. Additionally, a dashboard tool should be used to provide a visual and interactive representation of IT governance metrics, such as the IT Balanced Scorecard (IT BSC), the IT Dashboard, and the IT Service Catalog. A reporting tool should also be used to generate clear and concise reports that highlight IT governance metrics such as the IT Governance Report, the IT Value Report, and the IT Risk Report. This will enable you to make informed decisions about your IT governance objectives, indicators, targets, results, recommendations, value delivery, customer satisfaction, risk exposure, mitigation actions and compliance issues.

4 Review and improve your IT governance policies

Finally, you need to review and improve your IT governance policies based on your IT governance metrics and feedback. This will help ensure your policies are relevant, effective, and aligned with your IT culture and business needs. To do this, you should use a continuous improvement cycle that involves four steps (plan, do, check, and act). Additionally, a change management process with five stages (initiate, plan, execute, monitor, and close) should be implemented. Furthermore, it’s important to involve stakeholders in the review and improvement process, as well as solicit their input and feedback. Possible actions for reviewing and improving policies include defining improvement goals and scope, implementing improvement actions and initiatives, evaluating results and impacts, measuring performance and benefits, communicating findings and lessons learned, and celebrating achievements.