Organizational Excellence through Governance and Building for Operations Dave Remmer Architect Advisor Microsoft Canada

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 ModeStrategic Mode Support ModeTurnaround Mode Need for Reliability Need for New Innovation Information Technology and the Board of Directors – Nolan & McFarlan – HBR Oct 2005

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 Governance Definition: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 Results P. Weill and J. Ross HBS 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 Content These are a good start, and remember: Bing is your friend! Patterns & Practices Channel 9

Resources Go to TechDays It’s our big cross-Canada training conference held in the fall (covering 8 cities this year) Big conference content, but with local speakers and a 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 Conferences To 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