IT Governance, key and still alive

So many publications mentionning this topic. Does that mean that
- nobody understand anything?

- there are some unsolved problems in the concept and its application?

- it is now just a way for vendors (consultants, gurus, SOA solutions providers, scorecard specialists ) to market

- Organizations, in spite of the "official speech", are very very far from that?

One of the permanent criticism is that too much governance can kill agility, can kill innovation and adaptation.

It is sure that governance concepts and techniques are mainly "mechanistic", and sometimes far from systemic and "organic" adaptation.

Often too, within governance speeches, a "human" point of view is developed, but is it sincere or just "window dressing"?

Some rebounds on that:

- Is governance, agility incompatible? May be, not?

- SOX and management decommitment !!!

This can occur in some big companies, that are sometimes exceptional at the IT Governance point of view (IBM, ...), and now try to find the right balance between control and need of organic adaptation...

- the key Application Portofolio Management (APM) again and again

- as everybody knows, indicators are connected to Governance. BSC concept is not far, strategic mapping tools too...

Some example of comment on a good usage of bsc...
...a lot of education in business schools on BSC, in a lot of different disciplines
(financial control, governance, strategy, business plans, ...)
examples of students thinking on bsc...

CIO is just in the middle of all that.
- a lot of choices to do in the permanent pressure of demands...
- ...with end user power at last...
- Governance often means contracts. But contracts don't solve everything:
SLA (Service level agreements contracts) cannot replace cooperation in case of outsourcing

- How can CIO solve application challenges? Replace everything by an ERP ? Bridge everything with SOA and Web services? Good question.

- ...And CIO has to use already existing models like ITIL (and others, Cobit, CMMI, ISO xxx, ...)