Friday, February 20, 2009

governance marbles

The University has asked central IT to look at duplicate and redundant services. This a good thing. A very good and important thing. I'll be scribbling about it quite a bit, I'm sure.

Right now I'm trying to come to some sense of how central IT defines governance. In my small shop, "governance" is a methodology -- a means by which we do our jobs as a reflection of (and in alignment with) the organization's philosophy. It gets tricky for us sometimes because "philosophy" gets easily confused with "mission" when the organization is in the midst of rapid change.

I'm not sure central IT shares this over-simplified definition of governance. In fact, I'm sure it can't. The complexity of a university as a collection of disparate and often competing entities makes it nearly impossible to imagine governance as a functional unifying activity. Framework is more like it. I'll need to keep this in mind as we move forward.

Yes, much more to come on this and the duplicate services initiative.

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