Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.
Since the introduction of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) in 2002, the focus on IT governance has been intense within publicly traded companies, government and even privately held medium- to large-scale organizations. Standards and frameworks like
CObIT(Control Objectives for Information and related Technology)
AS8015 (Australian Standard for Corporate Governance of Information and Communication Technology)
CMMI (Capability Maturity Model) and
ISO 27001
have been established to address various aspects of governance. It all gets very confusing, frustrating and prone to bureaucratic over-control.
To illustrate the extent to which IT Governance can get out of control consider the IT governance organization in place at UC San Francisco:
While well-intentioned, it begs the question: “How many committees does it take to insure that IT is well managed and governed?”
Today, there is an effort afoot to re-visit SOX and its compliance components with an eye toward simplification. The process of simplifying IT governance begins with an understanding of the goal. To find a goal statement of IT governance that is easy to understand is not easy at all. Wikipedia, for example, states the