Wow, what a question. I would love to simply answer, "Yes" - with a simple follow-up sentence like, "IT governance ensures all information technology decisions are aligned to the business, deliver value, and manage risk, resources and performance. Given this characterization, if one of the business strategies is innovation, then IT governance would be invoked to ensure the enterprise makes the appropriate decision to maximize IT's contribution to realizing that innovation goal. But I can't leave it at that because I have personally experienced a near universal misunderstanding of the purpose and scope of IT governance.

Almost every organization I have encountered addresses only a subset of IT governance - and project control (or project investment oversight) is frequently the only information technology-related set of decisions being "IT governed." Risk management is generally the other subset of IT governance, that when addressed, mistakenly leads enterprises to cross IT governance off their list of "things to do."

So yes, I would urge all enterprises seeking innovation to view IT governance as a source of innovation - and to ensure the appropriate governance mechanisms (roles/committees and supporting/enabling processes) are established and managed to make and realize the information technology decisions that will foster that innovation.

Barry Schaeffer

Principal Consultant, Content Life Cycle Consulting

Posted on Sept. 30, 2011

There are probably as many shades of an answer as there are answerers, but here is my take.

The ability to govern a resulting system environment goes a long way toward determining what is and is not innovation.

If a great new idea can be brought to fruition within the scope of available IT resources where they are needed, then maintained over its logical life cycle, it may be said to qualify as innovation. If, for whatever reason, it cannot, then no matter how innovative the idea may seem, it is really just dreamin' and will add nothing to the equation until things change. IT governance, in the broad sense, is a key determiner of which side of that fence an innovative idea falls on.

This does not, I understand, invalidate the idea as innovative, and if the IT-related circumstances can be changed to support it effectively--a very governance-related "if"--then the dream can become reality. Short of that, however, we must not look at the idea as self-justified on its innovative nature, but look instead at the entire picture, IT and other variables, to determine if it can become a working innovation.