By Greg Johnson
IT governance is in demand more than ever in this era of enhanced accountability, but how do you implement it on a day by day basis? One way is to let the computers do the “heavy lifting” by setting up batch jobs to make sure tasks are timely, reviewable, and complete. Why? Well batch processing has been around for so long that it’s almost guaranteed that you have this capability. Now I’m not suggesting you can program all of your compliance needs into a batch job and forget about it, (wouldn’t that be nice) – but the batch job can be used to kick things off. Your compliance efforts require periodic reviews of performance indicators which lead us to the next step:
Service requests
If you have a process for service request management (and you do, even though you may not call it that) then you also have a way to manage these periodic compliance tasks. Furthermore, if you are fortunate enough to have a tool that enables custom design of service requests, (like Kinetic Request) even better. You can author service requests specifically to track each task in IT governance. Checking the capacity of a system every day, or assessing change management success rates, for example.
Leveraging the approval process
Most of the time, a service request requires approval. From the perspective of a compliance check, the evaluation may need sign off by a manager or perhaps just another reviewer. Repurposing service requests to compliance makes even more sense in this case since you can use the approval for this. It’s also reassuring to know that the notifications surrounding the approval process raises awareness of what ‘s being done for compliance.
