Resources
Introducing Process to IT Planning
Risk and Compliance Assessment:
In its responsibility for ensuring compliance in the enterprise, IT has the task of scoping compliance-relevant systems, eliminating any risks posed to the systems, determining responsibilities for compliance evaluation, continuous monitoring, documentation and assessment of the compliance-relevance of system changes, and reporting changes to the compliance or risk management office. It is an on-going exercise in controls assessment in the evolution of a corporation’s IT landscape. In anchoring control processes and objectives into the IT architecture, organizations can better keep up with the constant demands for evaluation. Workflows can ensure that certain controls are performed automatically on a pre-defined schedule and can help make compliance surveys more efficient by defining a uniform process for collecting information.
Workflows and Quality Initiatives
Workflows can be very instrumental in supporting an enterprise’s quality initiatives. With the goal of process improvement, workflows can make processes visible, repeatable and measurable. They can also help alignment to strategy. Let’s consider, for example, Six Sigma. One of Six Sigma’s key methodologies is “DMAIC” (Wikipedia) which is used to improve an existing process. It consists of the following steps:
- Define process improvement goals that are consistent with customer demands and the enterprise strategy
- Measure key aspects of the current process and collect relevant data
- Analyze the data to verify cause-and-effect relationships
- Improve or optimize the process based upon data analysis
- Control to ensure that any deviations from target are corrected before they result in defects
Automated workflows help with all five. In designing a workflow, planners will examine a process and reduce it to its essence, streamlining the way it is carried out, eliminating unnecessary steps, and standardizing exceptions to be able to cover eventual variations in the process. Based on the characteristics of the individual workflow – e.g., a project to be approved – individual steps of the workflow may be added or omitted. For instance, a project only applicable to an individual business unit and below a pre-defined budgetary threshold may be approved by the business unit’s decision board whereas projects cutting across multiple business units or exceeding the budgetary threshold have to prove strategic alignment and are decided on by the enterprise portfolio board.
The workflow design may upfront incorporate variables that aim at a gradual reduction of cycle time over the course of time. For instance, where the workflow definition may give a certain activity – say, the architecture verification – three weeks to complete this period may gradually be reduced to two weeks and ultimately five working days.
Workflow in planningIT
Companies who have adopted planningIT have done so because they realize that the processes they have implemented - or want to implement – are not or cannot be adequately supported by a collection of disconnected spreadsheets, text documents and presentation slides. Their IT Planning is a series of interrelated phases and processes that depend on the ability to relate all types of planning and architecture information to each other depending on the management function at that particular point of the process. planningIT provides this integrated information base as well as a platform of functions for putting the information into the right context for each particular phase of the process or workflow.
Automated workflows in planningIT improve IT governance, compliance, efficiency, and – importantly - collaboration in IT Planning and Management. planningIT’s workflow capability supports enterprises in configuring complex standard workflows. Using workflows, the organization can:
- Configure and implement automated workflows for enforcing processes and ensuring their transparency
- Track and coordinate the activities of the various stakeholder contributions to the EA management process
- Monitor and measure the quality of IT Planning processes and thus be able to improve their efficiency and effectiveness
