One of the workshop sessions we put on as a group the other week in Munich was around ‘IT Governance’ in Higher Education.  John Townsend of Liverpool John Moore’s University facilitated the session by leading us through the current setup at LJMU and how well it’s working for them in managing investment and strategy across the University.

I’ve heard John speak through this before and he’s always rather self-deprecating about his involvement in how successful they have been in really getting to grips with Governance as a whole.   Their story is oneof adopting successful and proven approaches elsewhere in industry, without getting bogged down in intellectualising whether what’s good for everyone else is applicable in a ’special case’, as can sometimes happen in HEIs.

One of the points that came up on numerous occasions was the general displeasure at people using the prefix of ‘IT’ in IT Governance.  In short, the prefix tends to reinforces the whole ‘us’ and ‘them’ standoff between ‘IT’ and ‘Business’ where IT either think or are expected to govern themselves and have some artificial interface with the business.  I guess it’s a bit like having a service counter approach at the stores where the business rocks up and asks for a can of tartan paint, to which the IT shop’s response is to head off in to the back to try and come up with the goods out of sight.

So what this means for well-established institutions with large and sometimes seemingly unwieldy governance structures is that a more desirable behaviour would be to develop a more mature approach to practical engagement with IT development at the core of business and quality improvement, rather than having the two approaches be distinct from one another.

Even if an organisation can manage to change itself to be more optimised in its governance, then there is still the more complex and multi-faceted people dimension which fills that structure. As a force, this could either be good or bad, depending upon the culture of the organisation and how people conduct themselves within that.  That said, waiting for a perfect governance structure to roll along is not likely to happen without a significant external shock to the system – say, for instance, through a major security issue arising or through an unexpected cut in funding.

Place your bets on which is likely to happen first…