| | October 20158CIOReviewopinionin myA successful office should have all of these components, that is, a GPPM office: IT governance, portfolio and project managementGPPMO: Maximizing Collaborative Decision Making and Successful ProjectsBy Michael Hites, CIO, University of Illinois systemn a central IT department, someone has to build the strategic plan, manage the prioritization process, start and finish projects, and ensure that the customers get what they need. In many large IT organizations, the governance, project management, business process improvement, and customer relationship management are performed by separate groups. At the University of Illinois System IT office, we prefer an end-to-end approach where the same department guides all of these functions.In our system-level IT organization, there are about 220 employees that improve and maintain the enterprise IT services used for transactional business processing, data warehousing and analytics, process improvement, and records management. The University of Illinois is a system of three campuses in Springfield, Chicago and Urbana-Champaign that serves about 79,000 students with about 25,000 employees. The university is highly decentralized, and there are centralized IT services, shared IT services, and local IT services throughout. In total, there are over 100,000 customers (not counting the 700,000 living alumni) and over 100 different IT groups at the university. Providing effective IT governance and planning in this environment is challenging.IT governance defines the processes, components, structures, and participants for making decisions regarding the use of IT. It collects ideas, reviews and selects, and prioritizes resources in the most strategic manner possible. IT governance promotes transparency, strategic alignment of the university and IT, resource allocation, performance management, collaboration, standards and policy, and it encourages constituents to participate actively in the process.As Gartner and EDUCAUSE suggest, IT governance should be only as complex as needed. In a small organization, one committee can handle the strategic and operational prioritization. In a larger organization, an executive committee or steering committees might be needed. Depending on what needs to be governed, committees can be focused on constituent types, like faculty members or students, or focused on functions like research or enterprise architecture.After our ERP migration in 2004, we had a large backlog of improvements and integrations, so we established a specific governance process that consisted of cross-campus subcommittees representing the functions of finance, HR, and student business processes. Our customers can choose to participate in any aspect of this process. Some write their own proposals, while others add their own local development resources to the projects. All of the work is managed through the centralized GPPMO.Regardless of the shape or size of governance, it needs to have something specific to govern, or else the process will become sparsely-attended with unfocused discussions that meander indefinitely. Our IT governance process has been sustained because it directly manages resources. Specifically, there are 70,000 hours of project time and $1.4M of annual funding managed by the governance group. The committees are active and engaged because they direct the allocation of centralized resources to their campus needs. Since the pool of resources is finite, the group must discuss and prioritize to achieve the greatest impact for the least cost.In order to have effective guidance for the governance process, IT should be part of the planning process in an organization. The Society for College and University Planning defines integrated planning as a process to promote academic, financial, facilities and I
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