Boards, executives and IT professionals clearly need to collaborate and stay aligned to achieve everyone's goals. The inherent challenge is determining the respective roles of IT management and IT governance.
Many organizations struggle to draw a line between the roles of IT management and IT governance. Some even consider them two different words for the same thing.
So what sets IT management apart from IT governance? What are each area's responsibilities? In today's article, we explain the goals of IT management and IT governance, how they differ and how they relate.
Differences between IT management and IT governance
In short, IT governance is responsible for setting and overseeing the function's strategic direction, while IT management is responsible for turning that strategic direction into operations that achieve the goals.
According to COBIT 5, governance ensures that stakeholder needs, conditions and options are evaluated to set balanced objectives through prioritization and decision-making, while also monitoring performance and compliance against agreed objectives.
The main responsibilities of IT governance are therefore:
- Evaluate and set objectives for IT with the whole company in mind;
- Direct the function through prioritization and decision-making;
- Monitor performance, compliance and progress against the established strategic direction and objectives.
IT management, on the other hand, must execute and monitor the activities needed to achieve the objectives set by governance. Executive managers make routine operational decisions and handle all the administrative work that keeps activities running.
Executive managers are also the link between the board and the rest of the workforce. One of their roles is to communicate the board's expectations to other employees, breaking governance demands down into short- and long-term operational goals and tracking them from implementation to completion.
The key difference between IT management and IT governance, then, is that the board sets company policy, while managers are responsible for finding ways to carry out that policy and delegating the related work to employees.
How IT management and IT governance relate
When IT management and IT governance are aligned and their roles are well defined, IT is aligned with the business strategy as a whole.
In addition, every organization is subject to numerous laws and regulations that govern IT processes, such as data protection and financial accountability. A solid IT management and governance framework helps a company stay compliant and meet internal and external expectations.
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