What is Governance and Practice in ITIL ?
Governance and Practice
Governance and practices serve as guidelines and benchmarks that IT organizations can adopt to ensure that their business performance remains competitive and are performed accordingly.
Governance is a platform used to ensure proper implementation of policies and strategy. It defines roles, responsibilities and standards that should be applied in the business environment. There are two important types of governance in IT:
• Corporate Governance:
“The ethical behavior by directors or others in the creation and preservation of wealth for all stakeholders.” The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 is an example of measures that has been taken to avoid fraudulent behavior by corporate giants.
• IT Governance:
“An integral part of corporate governance that ensures that the organization’s IT sustains and extends the organization’s strategies and objectives.” There are rules and regulations that IT must comply to and IT is expected to utilize as well as create additional value by using existing resources. It is important to distinguish between Governance and Management:
• Governance is about maintaining proper policy and procedures to ensure that IT is “doing the right things”.
• Management is about “doing things right”.
Good practices encourage service providers to maintain a competitive advantage with competitors. Organizations can learn, enhance or develop their services to meet the benchmark set by best practices of competitors.
Best Practice is “the best identified approach to a situation based on observation from effective organizations in similar business circumstances”. ITIL® is an example of Best Practice.
