IT Governance Overview
Over the past few years, there has been increasing attention on how Information Technology (IT) is governed in higher education institutions. One reason is the significant impact IT systems have on how the institution’s work gets done. IT, as an enabler of institutional excellence, requires extensive collaboration among stakeholders, which is complicated by the exponential growth of education and research, and the accompanying competition for funds. Many factors in higher education challenge the requirements to set and align institutional IT strategic decisions. Our goal is to create a transparent governance framework to prioritize work to be done by the Office of Information Technology that instills trust and commitment.IT Governance describes who makes which decisions, who provides inputs and analyzes the issues, who sets priorities, and who settles disputes when there is no clear consensus. Good governance processes are actively designed and well understood by participants, and foster timely decisions that are communicated effectively. Ultimately, desirable behavior in using IT means behavior that is aligned with and helps achieve institutional strategic goals. It is concerned with the whole enterprise IT function, not just the central IT organization. Day-to-day operations fall within IT management, outside the scope of governance.
IT Governance has higher chances of success the more it reflects the culture and decision-making style of UT Arlington and the more it is integrated with existing decision-making and operational management processes. Based on UT Arlington’s IT audience, the picture below depicts the variety of IT services that need to be addressed in IT Governance:
Carefully designed IT governance provides a clear, transparent IT decision-making process that leads to consistent behavior linked back to the senior management vision while empowering everyone’s creativity.
Higher education IT governance is broken into five types of IT Decisions, using Educause recommendations as a basis and refining it for UT Arlington usage:
- IT Principles: High Level Statements about how IT is used in the business
- IT Architecture/Infrastructure: Set of technical choices, policies, procedures, guidelines, and standards used to achieve a desired level of business/academic and technical integrations and standardization.
- IT Enterprise Solutions: Core Shared IT services that provide the foundation for the enterprise's IT capability, providing foundation for enterprise-wide capabilities. (MyMav, Email, etc)
- Departmental Application Needs: Specifying the business need for purchased or internally developed IT applications
- IT Investment: Large funding decisions on how much and where to invest in IT
Governance Participants include:
- Executive Leadership: Groups of Cabinet-Level executives or an individual executive. Excludes IT executives acting independently
- IT Leadership: Individuals or groups of IT executives
- Business Units: Administrative and Academic leaders, Community of Practice (small focus groups such as Web Standards) leaders, key process owners or their delegates)
- IT Governance Committee: Cross-Representation of Campus Leadership (executive and business unit level leaders of academic, administrative and IT areas)