New House Rule: Non-Compliance is now Mandatory

In Circumventing the CIO - What's the Harm?, Andy Blumenthal enumerates some of the potential issues when technology is introduced outside of normal IT channels.

In simplest terms, what Andy describes is a classic conflict between IT and the rest of the company. To complicate matters, the ever increasing consumerization of IT makes it easier to bypass the traditional list of project hurdles imposed by most IT organizations.

I am, however, somewhat dismayed at the list Andy provides. Despite his reminder about striking a balance, the list might lead one to believe that there is no room for risk in business. On the contrary, business is about managing, sometimes leveraging, risk. It is perfectly reasonable to expect that business can tolerate a certain amount of non-compliance to the risk aversion common in IT. In fact, there are circumstances where it must be part of a core business strategy. The key, as always, is to ensure the level of risk aligns with the needs of the enterprise.

If the level of non-compliance is out of alignment with business needs, the problem still reduces to one of conflict, rather than non-compliance. Regardless of whether IT is overly strict or the user is overly cavalier, the conflict is best served if IT starts adopting a posture more in line with basic conflict resolution/management/transformation concepts.

To be fair, Andy works in an industry familiar with bureaucracy and the command-and-control model. At the same time, it seems all IT organizations incur another type of risk if they do not allow a certain amount of free movement around the edges.

(Bonus points for fostering and participating in that free movement around the edges)

Governance Marketing

In Replace SOA Governance with SOA Marketing, Nick Malik proposes taking a different approach when motivating developments team to follow SOA standards.

I'm not completely convinced development governance can be replaced with marketing, but I'm also not convinced it's impossible. Regardless, it can significantly decrease resistance to standards.

It seems each of the categories of governance mentioned in Nick's article would be greatly simplified if marketing principles were applied. At the very least, it could help minimize a variety of unhealthy organizational reactions to governance activities. I submit that much of the burden associated with governance is related to managing the reactions to governance.