Discussion

Chapter 8 & 9 :  Information Technology Investments and Governance

Where do you think the Information Technology department should be spending its budget? Where does the funding for the IT department come from? For many organizations, the IT department is seen as an expense. This is a place where money is spent but no money comes back. Many in the financial sector think in terms of what’s called “Return on Investment (ROI)”, but how should one quantify what a spam filter on inbound emails does for a company in terms of ROI? At my bank, our spam filter cuts between 1.5 and 2 million emails a month from reaching their intended recipients. That translates into about 2,000 spam and phishing emails for each employee that they do NOT have to deal with. What’s the value on that?

The other major section of the lecture is related to IT governance. This is a bit of a ‘softer’ element of IT leadership. Performing the ‘hard’ (not meaning ‘difficult’ here) tasks can be straightforward. Filling out the budget spreadsheet, monitoring the network performance dashboards, making sure all the switches are properly configured, and so forth are tasks that are all probably already familiar. In IT governance, we’re talking about making strategic decisions regarding how the department and the team are managed. What steps does an IT leader need to take in order to fulfill the organization’s mission, vision, and goals while adhering to established policies, procedures, guidelines, and practices? That’s what you’re going to write about in your Discussion post this week. I look forward to reading what you have to say.