Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »September 15, 2002 — CIO —
Architecture?essentially the list of technologies you can and cannot use and the rules for allowing exceptions?is where most companies develop their first vestige of consistent IT governance. "It usually starts with someone in the business saying, How can we save money on IT?" says Jeanne W. Ross, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School Center for Information Systems Research. "And IT responds, Well, you can make sure everyone’s using the same PC."
Architecture is the most powerful governance tool CIOs have under their personal control. It’s how CIOs enforce the goals of technology standardization across a diverse company with many different competing interests. Vice President of IT David Drew uses architecture to drive the technology choices inside St. Paul, Minn.-based 3M, but he also uses it as a stick with vendors, who are all required to run their applications through a set of stress and security tests on 3M’s standard architecture. "Vendors are less likely to try to sell our businesspeople something that they know won’t fit with our architecture if they know they have to go through that process," he says.
Yet despite its power as a governance mechanism, architecture plays only a consultative role in most companies. That is, it’s not a hard stop if projects don’t conform, just a plea for changes. That’s no longer the case at Boston-based State Street Corp., where former CIO John Fiore has his Office of Architecture run by an IT senior vice president. (Fiore left State Street last month.) New projects must pass through the office before they can be approved. If the projects don’t match up with the architecture, the office will work with project sponsors to find a compromise.
Architecture may be a powerful tool, but it can also be dangerous. Too strict a policy can turn CIOs into the IT police, stopping more projects than they promote. That can generate resentment among businesspeople, especially at the local level where an overly rigid, slow architecture review process could mean lost revenue. In response, business unit leaders may try to fly below the review radar. For example, if a rule decrees that all projects over $100,000 must go before the board, units may break a big project into sub-$100,000 chunks. That is why governance mechanisms all need an appeals process, a safety valve.
At State Street, for example, projects don’t dead-end in the Office of Architecture. If there was an impasse, the units could appeal to Fiore. Now they can appeal to his successor, Joseph Antonellis. If a compromise can’t be achieved there, the aggrieved parties can go to the CEO. "That’s a great thing because it raises the stakes," says Peter Weill, director of the MIT Sloan School Center for Information Systems Research. If you’re taking your case for skirting the corporate architecture to the CEO, you’d better have a good reason. Indeed, very few appeals?one or two per year?get to State Street CEO David Spina’s desk. More important, the appeals process reinforces the message State Street wants to send: Ultimately, the business is accountable for IT decisions.