IT Governance - A prerequisite to EA

It's clear that moving towards the coordinated development of integrated, service-oriented information and application systems, will require decisions about IT systems development to be made in a coordinated way.

Bristol has suffered in the past from a disconnected decision making process which for has resulted in piecemeal application development, little thought towards infrastructural software (Identity Management, Document Management, etc.), and tactical system integration.

However, things are changing for the better - A new IT Governance framework has been designed and (mostly) implemented:

This is very timely as we are embarking on a Support Process Review (BPM) exercise that will most likely introduce some significant new systems to support any new organisation and changed processes.

In the new IT Governance framework, the Programme Management group has the role of coordinating business cases and managing dependencies. It will be this group that advises the Programme Executive on architectural matters, ensuring that decisions aren't made in isolation from the information systems landscape of the University as a whole (the enterprise).

The Programme Management group will itself be supported by the ISYS Applications/Systems Development group, which will have responsibility for technical direction for data and applications to support the emerging business change requirements, whilst also feeding technology requirements to the ISYS Infrastructure group.

My aim before moving forwards with EA, is to line-up the objectives and communications paths of the ISYS Applications/Systems Development group with the new Programme Management group and the ISYS Infrastructure group.