Introduction
- IT governance: an integrated part of company governance. Review of practices in French companies.
- The bases of governance. The basic law. The key principles for good IT governance.
- The debate on IS "cost" and "value". Measuring the value of the company. IT expenditure: a necessary evil or an investment? The Solow paradox. IS as a source of value creation.
- The field of application of governance.
The IS Department's place in the company
- Modelling the ISD's activity. The IT value chain. The IS Department's main processes. The general activity models: ITIL, COBIT, CMM.
- The perception of the ISD within the company. The dynamics of relationships between General Management, the IS Department and Operating Departments. Cost centre or profit centre. Service provider or partner.
- The link between governance and organisation. The breakdown of power between IS Departments and Operating Departments. Mechanisms and bodies for making decisions and assuming control.
- The ISD's internal organisation. A centralised, decentralised or federated model. The advantages and disadvantages of the different models. Finding the right balance: the functions to be centralised and those to be distributed. Standard organisation chart types for an IS Department: based on the internal customer, on the application value chain, or on the IS value chain. Close-up look at the "Requirements Definition" function.
- Governance and IT risks.
Implementing governance
The technology strategy
- The innovation cycle. Classification of technologies according to their life curve. Entropy within IS. Defining a technology strategy. Identifying and exploiting opportunities.
- IT urbanism. The origins of the concept: the metaphor of the city. Urbanism's key ideas and vocabulary. "Top-Down" approaches based on mapping. "Bottom-Up" approaches provided by technology. A proposal for an original, integrated approach combining the two previous approaches.
- Free software. Overview of the current offering over the different IS layers. "Free" versus "free of charge". The real level of savings. The issues and the risks. Free software service companies. A strategy with regard to free software.
- Integrating systems. UML. Principles of integration by HMI, by processes, by data. Overview of the available solutions. Limits of the EAI concept. Special features of the EAI project. SOA architectures: principles and limitations. SAN architectures.
The portfolio of projects
- Managing a portfolio of projects. Project inventory. Presentation of the process. Metrics for analysing and qualifying projects. Process for the "decision to go ahead" and prioritisation.
- The standard plan of a pre-project file.
- The project's business case. Types of costs and benefits. Project costs and recurrent costs. Ten rules for properly constructing your business case.
- Evaluating Return On Investment (ROI). Traditional financial methods (VAN, TRI, payback-period, EVA). Tangible and intangible benefits. Financial impact of immaterial gains. Examples and counter-examples.
- Estimating project workloads. The usual methods: COCOMO, Delphes method, function points. Advantages and disadvantages. Field of application of these methods. An example utilising the function points method. The relationship between total workload, time scale and resources. Key ratios.
- Managing the project trajectory. The problem. Parcelling out according to added value. Avoiding the "tunnel effect". Allowing for the early end to the project. The scalability curve: theory and practice. Identifying the warning signs of drift.
Human capital management
- The IT staff. Measuring the efficiency of teams: productivity metrics. Monitoring staff workload. Optimising the assignment of people to projects. Service centres and the mass production of development.
- Skills management. Defining a skills repository and job sheets. Carrying out forward-looking skills management. The probable changing nature of ISD jobs: rising, falling, transforming.
- Purchasing intellectual services. Creating a panel of suppliers and sustaining it. Choosing the most suitable service provider for each situation: general computing services company, packaged software supplier, temporary staff, freelance. Drawing up a reference list of tariffs. Controlling the purchase process. Using the "time-and-material", "fixed-price" concepts and their variants advisedly.
- Outsourcing. Good and not so good reasons for outsourcing. Selecting functions that are candidates for outsourcing. Risks and issues of outsourcing. Models of co-operation between the customer and the service provider: TMA, ASP, outsourcing, and joint venture. Conducting the outsourcing process. The key success factors.
- Offshore. The type of services proposed. The issues and risks of the concept. The real degree of savings. The contractual aspect. Application case studies.
Controlling costs
- IS cost dynamics. The principal sources of IT costs. The underlying trends that govern changes to them. The standard IS Department budget structure and its evolution over time. The company's total IT expenditure.
- IS cost measurement. Collecting data about the costs. Breakdown by activity according to an ABC (Activity Based Costing) approach. Itemising the costs in order to better reduce them.
- TCO: a key indicator. The concept's origin, evolution and derivative. Proposal of a realistic definition and a calculation method.
- Drawing up a strategy to control costs. One-off and long-lasting savings. The behaviours to be improved. Creating initiatives within the IS Department. Implementing an IT management control.
- Concrete approaches to reducing costs. Optimising technical infrastructures. Standardising work-stations. The thin client. Managing assets. The cost of software licenses. Sourcing policy.
- The budget process. Constructing the IT budget and "selling" it to the General Management. Operating expenses versus investments. Budget monitoring and analysing differences. Redefinition during the financial year. Towards the end of the yearly budget cycle?
- In-house billing for the IS Department's services. Constructing the IS Department's catalogue of products and services. Cost mechanisms and standard cost. Billing and price mechanisms. Advantages and disadvantages of in-house billing.
Demonstrating IS performance
- IT dashboards. General rules for constructing relevant dashboards. The properties of a good indicator. Dashboards internal to the ISD: Design dashboards, operations dashboards, help-desk dashboards, and financial dashboards. Dashboards for Operating Departments: Project dashboards, service quality dashboards. General dashboards: example of the IT Balanced Scorecard.
- Measuring user satisfaction. Perceived quality. Satisfaction surveys.
- Service Contracts or SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Fixing the level of service required. Measuring and improving performance: example of the "6 Sigma" method. Relevant indicators per SLA family (application, help-desk, network, server hosting, and work-station).
- Benchmarking. Good use of the contract's benchmarks. Relevance of current indicators. Internal or external benchmarking procedure. Application case study.
