Rupinder Goel, Global CIO at TATA

Tata communications has evolved as a leading provider in the new world of communications to help out enterprise customers and service providers worldwide. Rupinder Goel is a global technology leader with over 25 years of experience in IT and telecommunications for B2B and B2C and he works as a leading Digital Transformation at Tata Communications by driving adoption of cloud, mobility, big data, social and automation.

IT governance (ITG) is defined by Gartner as the processes that ensure the effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve its goals. Its role can be classified into the following categories.

What IT should work on:
IT demand governance is the process by which organizations ensure the effective evaluation, selection, prioritization, and funding of competing IT investments; oversee their implementation; and extract (measurable) business benefits. This is a business investment decision-making and oversight process, and it is a business management responsibility.

How IT should do what it does:
IT supply-side governance is concerned with ensuring that the IT organization operates in an effective, efficient and compliant fashion, and it is primarily a CIO responsibility.

In the Indian Context IT Supply has had more prominence than IT demand governance historically. The prime reason for that is the perspective of IT as a support functions and order taker. In this way of working managers solve business problems first and then figure out the use of IT in executing those decisions. Thus prime function of IT Governance restricts to the following:

Resource management:
Resource Management is comprised of three aspects. They are:

• How to manage resources more effectively?
• How to organize your staff more efficiently?
• Organizing employees by skills instead of by line of business

Performance measurement:
Putting structure around measuring business performance to see if individual employees are working as expected and projects are delivered on time and within defined cost.

Compliance:
Ensuring compliance with various norms and conditions set around the organization for transparent and effective working. This includes both internal norms as well as external industry wide standards.

Times have changed and with the evolution on Digital technologies and their widespread adoption role of IT Governance is changing much faster. Today technology is leading to creation of new business models and has become a key differentiator in the way organization delivers values. This has taken role of IT Governance to a much higher prominence. The expectations from IT Governance on supply side have grown to tremendous levels.  Following outcomes are expected from it.

Business IT Alignment:
Connecting business and IT so they work in tandem and synergise to produce value for customers.IT has to play a key role in finding solution to business problems and not just execute pre-defined solution. Ensure IT is exploited to the maximum for the benefit of the organisation.

Business Value Creation and Measurement:
Making sure that the IT functionexecutes the necessary plans to deliver the benefits promised at the beginning of a project or investment. It is also important that IT function measure the business value generated from the project and communicates across.

Thus it is important to transition IT Governance from demand side to supply side for playing a larger role and ensure IT does what it is supposed to do; become a true enabler for the organisation to create, deliver and measure business value.