Governance and Management of IT

[Samiuela Loni Vea Taufa]

2007.12.18 13:23 Edition

The key question I have to ask is if Ministry for Public Enterprise can be 'engaged' to finding training for the frameworks for IT Governance and Management ?

Presuming of course, that since MPE is pushing for Governance per-se with the courses for Directors, that this is something that might find interest for Donor organisations?

Purpose:

To build an IT Governance and IT Management Solution to address current and future needs of Government.

This Project proposal is for the formation of an ICT Review Committee, under broad terms of reference to identify and provide a roadmap that the Government of Tonga can use to build an effective IT Governance and IT Management solution based on International Best Practises. 

IT Governance will maximise IT delivering value and mitigating IT related risks.

IT Management will be fully integrated with the complete lifecycle of Government’s processes, improving service quality and agility. IT Management will actively identify service needs of Government and her customers and to focus on planning and delivering these services to meet availability, performance, and security requirements. In addition, managing service level agreements to meet agreed-upon security, quality and cost targets.

Need:

Information has become a resource and commodity, surpassing its traditional role as mere facilitator to political and economic decision-making.[1] Good management and governance of information and related tools (ICT) is significant to successful National Development. 

The practice of using ICT resources for their utility value is inefficient and significantly undervalues ICT’s enabling value for government services. Gaining strategic value from ICT is not a technology issue. Gaining strategic value from ICT is first the need for government to have a governance and management infrastructure that can align operational processes and methodologies, directions, with national goals.

Government lacks good governance or management of IT. 

The lack of governance and management has been shown in sub-optimal inefficient acquisitions of conflicting technology platforms.

Ineffective utilisation of existing resources

It is not uncommon to find government departments running one server for internet activities, another for storing files which no-one actually uses, and another for an unused database. Each of these servers run different operating systems and services with incompatible mechanisms for management, maintenance.

Knowledge and skills for managing services on one server are often not transferable to other servers. Underutilisation is a by-product of the extra human cost to gain skills in disparate systems (hardware and software.) Staff are therefore unable to optimise, secure the servers. 

As a consequence Backup and Restoring data for these servers can differ significantly. Differences have caused departmental operators to completely ignore any backup. This is an operational and strategic failure.

Undiscovered Strategic Value

Significant strategic value is buried in the IT assets of government. Communications has been significantly improved through ICT, but greater value can be obtained from existing resources were they better governanced and better managed.

Many government ministries and agencies operate their own email services, and yet with the same equipment they could have been provisioning strategic organisational information and tools such as calendaring, and issue management.

Rationale:

A key contributor to the successful implementation, utilisation of IT is good governance and good management. 

Good governance and management can be achieved, but it is not a framework of best practises that can be readily prescribed to the Tonga context. Governance and management are long term commitments for any organisation which entails engaging employees at all levels and for extended periods developing a common language, suppositions, and direction.

There exist many successful approaches at building governance and management structures for IT.  These frameworks beacon directions trod before such that we can learn from previous experiences and adapt solutions to approaches that will have a better probability of success in the Tonga context. 

Governance and Management of IT resources are paramount to efficient and quality performance of IT.

The better option for government is the revision of certified best practise methodologies

Feasibility:

There is a high chance of failure in such a large Organisational Change.

The literature defines this type of project as Type 4 “Research and Organisational Change,” which is classified as the type of project with the greatest chance of failure[i].

• The goals and the methods of achieving them are poorly defined (eg research and development projects, some organisational change projects)
• Planning may use soft systems methodologies
• Milestone planning is used where the milestones represent gateways, go/no-go decision points
• Air Projects as they are very difficult to catch hold of and deliver “blue-sky” research Objectives

Of successful IT Organisational Change programs, available to us in literature, the key elements driving their success has been Executive Management pursuit of the change through strategic management and strategic resource allocation.

In this regard, we can take as a need for increasing the probability for success that the ICT Review Committee needs:

·         well defined goals

·         well defined metrics for assessing goals

·         well defined methodologies

·         methodologies have sound theoretical underpinnings (shortcomings should be known and appreciated, factored for.)

·         methodologies are Best Practise (application is well understood and documented)

Time Scale

The ICT Review Committee should be capable of significant data collection within six months. Their report and recommendations should be capable of driving the implementation of the selected IT Governance model within 18 months of the Committee’s first meeting.

A full implementation of the ICT Review Committees report and recommendations on IT Service Management, considering other known case studies such as the University of Southern Queensland (discussed elsewhere in this Proposal,) may take between three and five years. Senior Managers can cause significant disruption through non-support.

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[i] Turner and Cochrane, Goals and Methods Matrix, 1993

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[1] Wilson, Laurie J. and Al-Muhanna, Ibrahim, “The Political Economy of Information: The Impact of Transborder Data Flows”, Journal of Peace Research 22 (1985), p 290.

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Samiuela LV Taufa
sa...@nomoa.com -or- samt...@gmail.com
www.nomoa.com; www.tongatapu.net.to
Ph: +676()62-717 Fax: +676()24-099