It’s good to know what you’re doing and why. That’s the idea behind one of the hot marketing terms that we seeing a lot of today—governance. It’s an idea (or goal) that’s also become the object of a variety of adjectives—IT governance, SOA governance, applications governance and more.
To some extent, governance is the latest marketing buzzword, as much as the paperless office was in the 1980s, updated for the 21st century with its implied focus on control and efficient management of IT (or application or SOA) environments. I’m not sure who coined the term, but it’s been around since the mid-to-late 1990s, gaining significant usage starting around 1999 and then gaining in popularity dramatically after the technology and economic downturn in 2001.
Based on conversations with business and IT leaders, the idea of governance—everything from IT Governance to SOA governance to application governance—continues to hold value. Although the term is overused, it still fills a need for organizations to find ways to quantify and qualify the IT or application investments they’re making.
