IT governance is an area of utmost importance to most, if not all, organisations in these times when businesses are absolutely dependent on their IT systems. Good IT governance combines excellent best practice in the area of operational procedures in the management of IT, coupled with very strong knowledge gathering and information reporting tools. Management without knowledge will never provide the best results or an optimised business.

When it comes to the generation, monitoring and reporting of valuable, useable knowledge from IT activities, SAS supplies an unrivalled range of offerings via the SAS IT Intelligence solutions. The SAS IT Intelligence solutions provide 'best practice' IT Balanced Scorecards (i.e. based on CoBIT and ITIL), Activity Based Management, Demand Management, Service Level Management and Analytical engines. All of these come with the aim of not only monitoring and communicating IT value, but also to help optimise the IT environment in order to support business objectives. This relates to ideas from a paper published by Bloor Research in 2005, 'Measuring the Business Value of IT Services', positioned the requirements for organisations today to undertake IT value management and linked these requirements with many components in the SAS IT Intelligence solution set.

It is fair to conclude that IT value management is unavoidable if an organisation wishes to prosper. This is especially the case now that IT systems are becoming considerably more flexible and capable of responding to new service demands in rapid timescales that, until now, were previously considered impossible to meet. However, with such infrastructure and resource allocation, flexibility will become a fundamental need to accurately assess any significant change in IT activity allocation, the effect these changes will have on existing service commitments and, perhaps most importantly of all, the net business value of any material alteration.

In a world of flexible IT, the requirement to accurately analyse asset resource allocation, coupled with activity based resource consumption will ensure that change management and the modelling/prediction of the net business value differential of such potential changes will become routine matters. As, indeed, shall be the need to communicate effectively and frequently with the consumers of IT services in terms that are easily understood. IT governance and business trust in IT are intimately linked with IT value management providing the information to make IT and business work together to deliver top line value to the organisation.

For further information on IT Governance, download this year's whitepaper from Bloor Research:
"Knowledge - the path to IT governance and trust" by Bloor Research, March 2006 (PDF: 169KB)