Case.Study:.Sidmar.–.Arcelor

The IT function at Sidmar is centralised providing services to its own organisation,
as well as to the group commercial department. The IT committee
at corporate level and the IBO committees at business unit level play an
important role in the IT governance process. An important mechanism in this
context is the well defined prioritisation process scoring IT projects on the
basis of their profitability, competitive advantage, operational excellence and
decision support capacity. Another important mechanism is the specific role
of the IT architects which primarily focuses on building a close relationship
between IT and business people. Further, a start is made by development
KPIs for IT.
Conclusion.Pilot.Studies
From these pilot case studies, different drivers for adopting IT governance
were identified. An important one was certainly the need to comply with
Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, which impacts heavily on the control environment
in IT. Although this is in the first place a US regulation, some of the
pilot companies studied, felt the need to comply because their US mother
company needed to comply or because customers/suppliers were requiring
it. Other important drivers for IT governance were the pressure to achieve
economies of scales after mergers and acquisitions and budget pressure,
resulting in a smaller IT budgets for new projects. The challenge, of course,
is then to optimally assign the remaining budget to projects and activities
that are delivering value to the business. Finally, some pilot case companies
mentioned that the IT governance project was more an effort of formalizing
and structuring existing structures and processes that were applied already.
Although the aforementioned IT governance definitions stated that IT governance
is a primary responsibility of the board of directors, it appeared from
the pilot cases that IT governance efforts are mostly not driven by business
strategic level management. The board was seldom involved in IT governance
and as a result, IT governance often had a rather operational focus. In all
cases, IT governance was mostly an initiative of the IT department.
From these six pilot cases, it is tentatively concluded that organisations are
indeed applying a mix of structures, practices, and relational mechanisms
to build up an IT governance framework. The IT department of these case