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A recent MIT study showed that most IT investments represented a slightly negative return to the firm. The Standish group said that in 2003, $98 billion dollars were wasted on failed IT projects. While no organization can exist without an IT department, with these cold realities in mind, one can clearly see why even IT is susceptible experiencing severe budget cuts.

This is why an organization must align the IT goals with the business objectives. But to do this, CIOs and IT managers must be aware of what the key business objectives are, and then constantly measure and adjust the IT strategies, based on IT’s ability to meet the business’s needs. Of course, this is easier said than done, but you’re about to get some help in realizing this vision.

IT governance, just like other governance subjects is the responsibility of executives and shareholders. It is not an isolated discipline or activity. It consists of the leadership and organizational structures and processes that ensure that the organizations IT sustains and extends the organizations strategies and objectives.

Because of the pervasiveness of Information Technology, IT governance occurs at many layers within the organization, starting at team leaders all the way up-to the board of directors.

At SAS, we are continually developing our SAS IT Management Solutions with IT governance functionality that provides our customers with the ability to manage their cost efficiency and operational effectiveness giving them the knowledge necessary to understand and communicate the issues and strategic importance of IT.

SAS understands the business costs associated with down-time failures and the remediation of problems. Regardless of your industry, SAS has the necessary software, expertise and best practices from numerous project installations to quickly deliver the exact solution to support your IT organization to get a clear, concise picture of resources, costs and service levels. Your ability to measure the value of IT’s bottom line impact will allow you to demonstrate it to your customers, both internal and external.

IT Governance in practice
Information Technology is crucial to the success and growth of the banking industry.  Fred Runnquist, Senior Vice President and head of IT at Sweden’s largest retail bank, Swedbank, remarks that, “IT governance is vitally important to us. If our computing systems aren’t running, the bank is effectively closed.”  With IT related activities accounting for a fifth of the bank’s running costs and with 6 million private and 350,000 corporate customers to serve, applying efficiency and economy in terms of revenues/costs through an IT governance program is a necessary discipline. One way in which Swedbank have applied IT governance is through a Service Level Management system underpinned by SAS IT Management Solutions.

Runnquist goes on to say ‘As head of IT, I can follow-up on any main systems.  If we don’t reach the goals set by the SLA’s, we can see this and create a taskforce to focus on stabilizing and improving the situation.  It’s a very focused approach – our CEO knows that direct action will be taken immediately if any problems arise.  SAS IT Management Solutions are used to track, monitor and report on the various systems that support the business”.

Running IT as a business
Measuring IT costs and maximizing resources are essential to any organization, especially if that company is a leading IT outsourcing provider like TietoEnator. As Kenneth Dufvenmark, director of Processing and Support for TietoEnator says, “If you don’t know what you’re doing internally, how can you convince the customer that you have the right solutions?”

TietoEnator chose SAS®  IT Resource Management and the SAS®  Knowledge Solution for IT Service Management, a combined solution that delivers the IT business intelligence required by people like Dufvenmark to plan, purchase, build, manage and maintain IT infrastructures. SAS IT Resource Management processes and transforms utilisation, availability and performance data for each component of the IT infrastructure to all levels of the business organization, from system operators through to the CEO.

TietoEnator’s SAS IT Management Solution is an invoice management application that Dufvenmark says “gives a business-oriented way of looking at the data which we haven’t had before.”  With SAS, TietoEnator can look at information not simply from a measure of work produced, but they can actually influence the data to analyse the cost and profits associated with various offerings, giving them an edge as an IT service provider.

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