I think there are two key drivers making IT governance hot areas for business today, one is efficiency, and the other is compliance, Pickus told ComputerWire, claiming that while general software industry revenue is increasing at between 3% and 5%, IT governance software revenue is growing at between 20% and 30%.
The Redwood City, California-based software vendor said a common thread links the various compliance issues faced by businesses across the world: control. With a history in project portfolio management, Pickus believes Niku is well placed to provide that control.
With compliance, whether it’s SOX, Basel, and combined code revisions, all of them are about ‘do we have control over the business’, he said. You must have an overall governance view of what’s going on in the enterprise. You simply must have a broader governance view that gives visibility and control of the big picture.
We will provide an overall dashboard view to see where things are amiss, he added. When you have a problem the best you can do is not have it become a big problem. The only way to do that is with a broad view of IT governance.
However, Niku is not the only IT governance vendor pitching its technologies as a solution to compliance issues. Last week, Mercury Interactive issued a new release of its Governance Center with a new Accelerator module, a set of template-driven guidelines for how companies should go about adapting their IT functions to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).
Mercury has used its own IT governance software to help achieve compliance with SOX. Martin Baker, Mercury’s IT director said the use of Governance Center helped the company keep control of this process.
You could implement SOX without a system to support it, but there would be no way to have the control, he said. It dramatically reduces the effort required to implement these sorts of procedures. To make sure every component is compliant, that single view makes it so much easier.
Compuware Corp is also pitching the IT governance technologies it acquired last year with Changepoint Corp at compliance requirements, and according to Ayman Gabarin, VP for EMEA at Compuware IT Governance, CIOs are starting to take note.
Before we were having to spend a lot of time explaining the benefits of this, today CIOs understand the benefits, he said, adding that two years ago, 80% of the company’s Changepoint revenue came from consultancies and services businesses, and 20% from IT departments. Today those percentages are reversed.
The challenge for CIOs is that they can communicate those benefits and begin to deliver them, he said, maintaining that it is in the IT department’s best interests more than ever to demonstrate its effectiveness, not least due to legislative requirements to prove sound business and IT processes.
