Your Guide to Better IT Governance

Low-code governance is a term that’s been misunderstood and misapplied. It’s a term so abused that IT governance, once a tool to promote and foster business value and innovation, now ironically prevents anyone from getting stuff done. In this series, I’ll cover why IT governance is still worth doing, and what successful IT governance actually looks like in the real world.

I’ll never forget the day I heard those four fateful words from executive management: “What’s the governance model?”

At the time, I was an application architect, new to the world of governance. That question launched me on a three-year journey of research and discovery to determine what IT governance models really were, where they came from, what they were intended to accomplish, and how to implement them.

Throughout all my research, the question that kept coming up is “Why are governance models so universally terrible and maligned, especially when they are so crucial to organizational success?”

There needs to be a better way to do IT Governance, and a battle-tested new approach that is being executed with success. Today I’m incredibly proud to announce the culmination of that journey with the launch of Your New Governance Framework. This technology-agnostic guide not only provides the “what’s, and why’s” of our new approach to IT Governance but also shows you how to do each step and includes a workbook so you and your team can create these models on your own.

What’s in the Guide?

The issue with governance isn’t that it’s annoying to implement and abide by; rather, it can be a huge impediment to your organization’s progress. In a Gartner survey, “Balancing Autonomy with Control: New Governance Models for Digital Business,” the authors state that 70% of those surveyed say their companies’ standards are not designed to apply to digital business teams. In other words, governance is failing to support business stakeholders.

The goal of the guide is to take you through building your own IT Governance models that focus on empowering your entire organization to create business value. To that end, we’ve included a basic primer on the state of IT Governance, the rules of the road for building effective IT Governance Models, and detailed descriptions for each piece of our new framework.

The Wise IT Governance Framework

  1. Core Mission – What is the initiative and why are we doing it?
  2. Foundational Principles – The bedrock for the initiative, driving proper management behavior, and directing decision-making
  3. Organizational (or Functional) Governance – The people, process(es), platform, and portfolio supporting and enacting your initiative
  4. Technical Governance – The enablement of the technical realization of the initiative

These four framework sections ensure that you will build out an effective model regardless of the IT initiative you are governing. To provide as much clarity as possible, our guide not only discusses the purpose of each section but gives you step-by-step instructions on how to build each part of the framework, along with explicit examples that can be used in your own organization.

Taking things one step further, we’ve provided a workbook alongside the guide that allows you to build your own IT Governance models while going through the guide itself. We want to make sure you have all the tools you need to move your organization toward a more value-driving, value-fostering one. In fact, that’s the whole premise of our approach to IT Governance, get it done and out of the way so you and your team can start delivering quantifiable value.

This guide was created by a team with dozens of years of expertise leading IT initiatives, building teams, creating governance models, and delivering results.

More importantly this approach to IT Governance has been battle-tested by our customers of all shapes, sizes, and regulatory levels looking to incorporate low-code governance into their Mendix usage. So this approach will work for your organization, whether you’re a fast-moving startup, a diverse consultancy, or in a highly-regulated governmental space. This guide will work for your organization no matter the technology you seek to implement.

Let’s talk about governance

Got questions about the new IT governance guide? Low-code governance in general? Reach out to us to get the expertise you need to help your organization create appropriate IT Governance models, whether it be for low-code or any of the plethora of IT initiatives our team has experience in.

You don’t have to wait to start changing how your organization governs. You can download our new IT Governance Guide for free. Click the banner below and start your own governance journey. This time, there won’t be roadblocks.