Governance and Change Management

Solution adoption requires cultural change. Cultural change requires relevant, insightful data; well-planned governance, and relentless change management. Change is difficult in many ways and for many reasons. Without governance and change management, driving adoption for new solutions can be exhausting, unpopular, expensive, and slow. Governance and change management are inseparable but not interchangeable. One is not synonymous with the other. Governance and change management are tightly coupled and dependent on one another. Changes in one can certainly affect the other. What are they and how are they different?

Governance address the things that need to be accounted for as change is implemented. Governance is the operating agreement for how changes will take place for the things involved. Governance definitions and operating rules may define organizational structures, decision rights, workflows, processes, stakeholders, authorization points, and toll gates. The goal of governance planning is to talk through how things operate today versus how things will operate during and after the change. Well-planned governance ideally creates a target workflow that aligns and optimizes the use of business entity resources with the goals and objectives of the business.

Change management focuses on the people and how people will be assisted through changes being implemented. Changes to our norms can be real challenges. It is difficult to veer away from comfortable modes of normal operation, accepted and adopted workflows, team structures, roles and responsibilities, and known rules of engagement. Change management helps people transition through changes by providing things such as messaging and communication plans, engaging support, interactive training, and coaching, co-ownership in successes and wins.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• IT governance
• Change management
• IT service management
• Architecting cloud computing solution catalogs