Organizational Excellence through Governance and Building for Operations

Dave RemmerArchitect AdvisorMicrosoft Canadadremmer@microsoft.com

Agenda

• IT Governance Overview• Best Practices for Designing for

Operations

Governance Hierarchy Overview:

Corporate Strategy

IT Strategy

IT Governance

Extended Enterprise Governance

Governance – so why should I care?

Think of how costs go up in the order of a factor of 10 when defects are found in later stages of the SDLC

No, seriously: why does this matter?

Now think of costs at least a couple of orders of magnitude higher...

Align your projects to your overall IT Strategic Mode

Factory Mode Strategic Mode

Support Mode Turnaround Mode

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Questions all strategic modes should ask:

On a periodic basis your leadership team needs to ask the following questions:

• Has the strategic importance of our IT changed?

• What is our competition doing with their IT?• Is our infrastructure allowing us to exploit our

intellectual assets?• Depending on your mode, there are a number

of other strategic questions your leadership team need to ask periodically

IT GovernanceDefinition: Specifying the decision rights

and accountability framework to encourage desirable behaviour in the use of IT

IT Governance : How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior ResultsP. Weill and J. RossHBS Press © 2004

Archetypes for Decision Rights

Understand your organizational archetype and how it impacts the various types of decisions

• Business Monarchy – top managers• IT Monarchy – IT specialists• Feudal – business units• Federal – combined central IT with business

units• IT Duopoly – IT with one of the others above• Anarchy – isolated individual or small group

IT Decision Types• Principles : clarifying the business role of IT• Architecture : defining integration and

standardization requirements• Infrastructure : determining shared and

enabling services• Business Applications : specifying the

business need for applications (bought and built)

• Investment and Prioritization : choosing initiatives and setting budgets

IT Principles Questions

• What is the enterprise’s operating model?

• What is the role of IT in the business?• What are IT-desirable behaviours?• How will IT be funded?

IT Architecture Questions• What are the core business processes of the

enterprise? How are they related?• What information drives these core processes?

How must the data be integrated?• What technical capabilities should be

standardized enterprise-wide to support IT efficiencies and facilitate process standardization and integration?

• What activities must be standardized enterprise-wide to support data integration?

• What technology choices will guide the enterprise’s approach to IT initiatives?

IT Infrastructure Questions• What infrastructure services are most critical to

achieving the enterprise’s strategic objectives?• For each capability cluster, what infrastructure

services should be implemented enterprise-wide and what are the service-level requirements of those services?

• How should infrastructure services be priced?• What is the plan for keeping underlying

technologies up to date?• What infrastructure services should be

outsourced?

Business Applications Needs Questions

• What are the market and business process opportunities for new business applications?

• How are experiments designed to assess whether they are successful?

• How can business needs be addressed within architectural standards? When does a business need to justify an exception to the standard?

• Who will own the outcomes of each project and institute organizational changes to ensure the value?

IT Investment and Prioritization Questions

• What process changes or enhancements are strategically most important to the enterprise?

• What are the distributions in the current and proposed IT portfolios? Are the portfolios consistent with the enterprise’s strategic objectives?

• What is the relative importance of enterprise-wide versus business unit investments? Do actual investment practices reflect their relative importance?

Governance Mechanisms• Decision Making Structures• Alignment Processes• Communication Approaches

Mechanisms: Decision Making Structures

• Executive or senior management committee• IT Leadership committee• Process teams with IT membership• Business / IT relationship managers (Please note

that Weill and Ross’ study found this the most effective of all mechanisms!)

• IT council with business and IT executives• Architecture committee• Capital approval committee

Mechanisms: Alignment Processes

• Tracking of IT projects and resources consumed

• Service level agreements• IT Investment approval• Architectural review / exceptions• Formal tracking of business value of IT• Chargeback arrangements

Mechanisms: Communication Approaches

• Work with groups who break governance rules

• Senior management announcements• Office of CIO or office of IT governance• IT portals and online communications

vehicles

7 Characteristics of Top Governance Performers

• Managers in leadership positions can describe IT governance

• Senior managers actively engage in the governance process & a number of senior managers are involved simultaneously

• Clear business objectives for IT investment• Differentiated business strategies• Minimal renegade & more formally approved

exceptions• Few changes in governance from year to year

The Extended Enterprise• Extended Enterprises are the customer centric

organization of business processes that span multiple corporations and other entities

• They usually bring “best of breed” processes together from disparate organizations in order to better fill a customer need(s)

• SOA is an enabling technology that may be able to enable this type of organizational structure

• “The pace of change in today’s competitive environment is accelerating. Although discontinuities within established organizations may not be obvious, enterprise governance implications of discontinuous change are even less so.” – Governance Institute

Deployment Best Practices:

Education and Communication• Begin discussions about the deployment

phase at the beginning of projects (not the end) and continue them throughout the SDLC

• Operations should be part of user acceptance testing

• Joint deployment by teams for initial and major releases

• Periodic “operations day” for developers

Deployment Best Practices: Modelling

• Model the application architecture• Use application modelling as part of the

architecture and design process• Model the deployment environment

Deployment Best Practices: Declarative Configuration

• As much as is reasonable configuration should be done through standard external file-based configuration files

• Configuration files should be heavily documented and this should be tested during user acceptance testing

• Trace / logging levels should be set within the configuration system

• Ditto for external data sources such as databases and ERP systems (although security issues may become important)

• Where feasible use frameworks that themselves can configured through file-based configuration files (WF, WCF, WPF)

Deployment Best Practices: Judicious Custom Event Logging• The system should be deployed with extremely

judicious logging based on different debugging levels – Use Enterprise Library Logging Block

• The level and location of logging should be declared in a configuration file

• Do not worry about performance• Ensure the most coarse grained logging is

“operations” readable – Use Enterprise Library Exception Block

• Make sure logging is part of the user acceptance test plan

Deployment Best Practices: Unit Tests for Deployment

• Create unit tests for wherever distributed components are called and ensure the operations team has the skills necessary to run them

• Build façade services that wrap external services and provide stock responses when this is necessary

• Ensure the test signatures make plain what the connectivity issue is

• Make sure user acceptance testing ensures there is a test for each breakage and each breakage has a test

• Actually test breakages to ensure the tests work

Questions ?

Resources

Get Guidance and Training ContentThese are a good start, and remember: Bing is your friend!

• Patterns & Practices• http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/

• Channel 9http://channel9.msdn.com

Resources

Go to TechDayshttp://techdays.ca/

• It’s our big cross-Canada training conference held in the fall(covering 8 cities this year)

• Big conference content,but with local speakers anda down-home price of admission(especially if you register early!)

• Deep dives into Microsoft tools and technology, including ALM scenarios

• Access to content from the TechDays and TechEd North America conferences

• Great giveaways• An excellent networking opportunity

Resources

Go to Other ConferencesTo find them, remember that Bing is your friend!

• Microsoft Developer Conferences

• DevTeach• PDC• MIX

• Code Camps• Local developer conferences held

by user groups and local heroes