IT Governance in the AI Era.

IT organizations have spent the past couple of years modernizing their technology, which marked their new journey into the era of digital transformation. That is a total shift from legacy systems to modern technology. With the quick evolution of new technologies, organizations must adapt to be competitive. This competitive approach leads to subjects like cloud, mobility, artificial intelligence come directly into our lives. IT organizations become more transparent with their growth which eventually moves to the adoption of the cloud platform. With this competition ahead, what most organizations fail to foresee is the importance of governance.
IT Governance:
IT governance is a key factor for any IT organization. According to Gartner, “IT governance (ITG) is defined as the processes that ensure the effective and efficient use of IT in enabling an organization to achieve its goals. IT demand governance (ITDG— what IT should work on) is the process by which organizations ensure the effective evaluation, selection, prioritization, and funding of competing IT investments”. The area of focus for the IT governance comes in ensuring the alignment between IT and business, risk management, capacity management, etc... Governance is important to the organization because there are chances for gaps to occur between what the business requires and what IT can deliver, organizations might not have the perception of what value IT can bring, and also it is necessary to measure the risks of IT implementations. IT is very complex and is continuously changing; this brings in the need for governance for better management and control.
AI-based IT Governance:
With all the advancement and adoption of new technology, AI is one such area that went widespread like fire. Most of the enterprise IT is moving to the era of cognitive automation by the adoption of AI. The potential AIOps holds for the IT team is remarkable. The implementation of AI for IT operations promises the capability of total cognitive automation. This implementation requires a substantial amount of care and concern. Therefore, IT governance in this era of AI is of much importance. 
Key focus areas of IT governance in the AI era :
With IT governance in hand, there is some major area that needs extensive focus. Below mentioned are some aspects that the IT governance should ensure:
1) Ensure that IT assets are appropriately monitored & maintained:
IT assets can be of any form such as servers, storage, network, end-user device, etc.. those that are hardware and software elements that are IT environmental resources. IT governance policy should ensure that all of these IT assets are adequately monitored and maintained to have no chance for any downtime. This is ensured by implementing AI-based observability capability, which observes deep into the health of the organization. With the AI-based observability on board, it is easy to find any unknown problem from a huge volume of data by the anomaly detection mechanism. This, in turn, helps in reducing the MTTR. Apart from that, enforcing proper IT governance helps in providing better risk management through auto-remediation. That is, any performance issues or downtime can be automatically identified and auto-remediated.
2) Ensure that IT assets are providing value to the organization:
Having a lot of IT assets just for namesake won't solve the problems. It is equally important to ensure that these assets are providing value to the organization. That is, even the smallest assets that are present in the system provide the right value. If the right value is not provided it means that we are paying for either what is actually not needed or just dumping up with resources. This is one area where IT governance plays a crucial role. By enforcing IT governance, a single pane of IT view is provided. This helps in summarizing the entire IT asset's value. Each IT asset can be mapped corresponding to its value and can be viewed from the interactive value dashboard. Apart from that, business value dashboards are also present which help in communicating IT value with the rest of the organization. With the proper governance of these assets, it is easy to map the business value. That is, each business metric and value can be correlated with IT metrics. This in turn helps provide the right business value. 
3) Ensure that IT systems are operated at the minimum cost:
One of the major factors that alert IT organizations are the cost of their operations. The improper IT governance policy can be a leading factor here. That is improper management of employees and IT assets. By enforcing proper IT governance and AI systems, operational costs can be reduced. The implementation of AI can help automate most of the tasks that were done manually. AI-based systems will handle most of the tasks with the least human intervention. As the process of automation is applied, the chance for re-doing any activity is avoided. The probability of manual error occurrence is also eliminated. Moreover, automation of certain mundane tasks is made possible. Also, the automation of on-demand tasks and requests helps in saving a lot of time.
4) Ensure that IT systems are always right-sized:
One other important factor is to have your environment right-sized. Measuring capacity and performance usage is a key factor in any organization. Lack of capacity management can lead to a situation where you will be paying for what is not needed. Implementing proper IT governance will help in understanding what the right capacity your organization holds is. With the proper understanding of the right capacity, accurate planning of IT assets required for the organization. This eventually helps in optimizing the operational cost to a great extent. With the right capacity management in hand, the concept of KPI prediction is made possible. KPI prediction will help to forecast the required capacity in the future and can initiate the procurement cycle appropriately to avoid any demand/supply issues.
Enforcing IT governance in this era of AI will help organizations properly structure out strategies required to meet the business vision. Embracing the power of cognitive automation, organizations can successfully meet the vision.
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