MAnGve: a step towards deploying Agile Governance Alexandre J. H. de O. Luna1,2, Ivaldir H. de Farias Junior1, Philippe Kruchten2, Hermano Moura1 1
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Informatics Center (CIn). Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). Av. Jornalista Anibal Fernandes, s/n, Cidade Universitária, 50740-560, Recife, PE, Brazil.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). The University of British Columbia (UBC). 2332 Main Mall. Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada.
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
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Abstract. Context: Agility at the business and organizational levels presents a challenge for many enterprises. Business agility demands the ability to sense and respond to changes in competitive environments, whereas organizational agility demands the dexterity to sense broader market opportunities and respond with changes that are organization-wide. These challenges require an information and communication technologies (IT) environment flexible and customizable simultaneously with the coordination across multiple organization units, also demands effective and responsive governance in order to deliver value faster, better, and cheaper to the business. Objective: This presentation introduces an agile framework called MAnGve, as an alternative to implement and improve governance processes and service management on an agile lifecycle. In addition, we describe the MAnGve’s application in the context of the Brazilian government. Method: Adopting an in-depth case study approach, we privileged the participant observation in which the research is conducted within the company itself, and where the status of the researcher is not highlighted. The case study was based on observation, interviews with the different actors of the company, as well as by the metrics generated by the results achieved upon the application of the framework. Results: After only two tides (complete lifecycle of the framework), along eight months, the involved team had been capable to implemented three governance processes and one service management function (service desk). At the same time, the team evolved from an operation based on "firefighting" to a maturity stage, where they are able to express their initiatives in terms of service management. Conclusion: Indeed, the framework's application generated a set of positive and concrete evidences, such as: i) guiding the team: “where to begin?”, “how to adapt?”, and “what to prioritize?”; ii) reducing the costs, timing and external dependencies. Those evidences lead the authors to believe that the MAnGve’s application can be replicated upon other organizations, achieving similar positive results. Moreover, those results encourages future works in which through a relational integration mechanism as well as a better understanding of the agile governance arrangements can help the organizations to attain greater enterprise agility and support their overall strategy. Keywords — Information Systems, Agile Governance, IT management, IT Governance, Service Management, Software Engineering.
1.Overview Governments and corporations are increasingly realizing the emerging importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as catalyst factor of the driving aspects of change, renewal and implementation cycle of their business. These organizations are deepening the perception about how the Information Technologies (IT1) capabilities are becoming key factors of success in the evolving of their market competitiveness and the achievement of their institutional mission [Gallagher and Worrell 2007; Tallon 2008].
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“IT” and “ICT” in this study will be used as synonyms, and understood as the means by which are covered the infrastructure, services and software as well as the organizational capabilities established to support the business.
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1.1.Introduction In recent years, IT has seen an increase in investment and research focus in both the academic and the professional environments. These initiatives have entailed efforts to improve management models and to implement practices that make enterprises more competitive. Competitiveness is related with the idea to make more, better and faster, with less resources [Janssen and Estevez 2013]. At the same time, governance is closely related with the ability to steer (to guide, to govern) an organization, which may be a company, a government or a society [Bloom 1991]. In other words, governance is a key driver to “make things happen” on organizational environment. On the other hand, to achieve good governance demands capabilities such as flexibility, responsiveness and adaptability, as well as an effective and responsive sense of coordination across multiple business units. Actually, these capabilities belong to the agility paradigm in consonance with several authors, such as [Matt 2007], [Chen et al. 2008], [Li 2010]. Moreover, [Kruchten 2011] define agility as: “the ability of an organization to react to changes in its environment faster than the rate of these changes”. In fact, this definition uses the ultimate purpose or function of being agile for a business, unifying and standardizing agile and lean approaches as simply "agile", rather than defining agility by a labeled set of practices or by a set of properties defined in opposition to the agile manifesto approach [Beck et al. 2001]. Going beyond, a “good governance” requests particularly “organizational agility”, which is stated by [Thomsett 2013] as: “the ability of an organization to respond quickly and effectively to unanticipated events in its environment”. As a result, agility became an important business aspect, and according to [Luftman et al. 1993], business agility is: "the ability to change the direction of the environment and respond efficiently and effectively to that change". In consonance with this definition, we distilled a new definition to business agility for use in this study as: “the ability to deliver value2 faster, better, and cheaper to the business”. In line with these concepts, “agile governance” becomes the application of agile capabilities3 on governance issues4 in order to improve business agility, what we believe that can result in significant economic outcomes for companies and governments. In the subsequent sections this paper gives an overview of the related theoretical background, the related work, benefits to be achieved by the audience, the agenda summary, the suggested audience's profile and a short Bio of the speaker.
1.2.Background and Related Work In this scenario, IT governance, through which corporate governance5 is applied, has emerged as an option to the effective management and control of IT services in organizations, ensuring the payback of investments and the improvement and innovation of business processes [IT Governance Institute 2001]. Through the influence of factors related to market regulation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act [Congress of the United States of America 2002] and the Basel Accords [Bank for International Settlements 2010], the use of governance is also motivated by other objectives, such as: i) reducing the costs of business unavailability; ii) assurance of continuity of business processes; iii) guarantee of IT investments payback; and, iv) increasing organizational competitiveness [Weill and Ross 2004]. Ribeiro and Barata [2011] pointed out that to face competition; enterprises have adopted more efficient organizational dynamics that enable them to respond to socio-economic pressures while tackling profitable but volatile business opportunities. This led to the emergence of several types of networked interactions: supply chains, extended enterprises, virtual enterprises, collaborative networks, among others. Overall, agility is fundamental as the establishment of such networked organizations is not trivial. Partners will share profits, risks and responsibilities and ultimately the performance and success of the entire structure will always be dragged down by the less agile participant [Brown et al. 2013; Royce and Cantor 2013]. In practice, the design and maintenance of the IT systems for enterprise agility can be a challenge when the competitiveness of organization’s products and services is depending of the application of models and frameworks that have no guidance details of how to implement and deploy the necessary management instruments and governance mechanism [Luna et al. 2013]. Consequently, the challenges become even greater when dealing with these matters on a global software development and distributed environment, where cultural differences, awareness and communication style, if not treated properly can lead to conflicts. Arguably, in Global Development Environments governance issues are even more relevant and necessary, as well as its implementation even greater challenging [Dubinsky et al. 2011].
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“An informal term that includes all forms of value that determine the health and well-being of the firm in the long run.” [BD 2013] “The power or ability to do something.” [OED 2013] 4 “An important topic or problem for debate or discussion.” [OED 2013] 5 “is the set of processes, policies, rules, laws and institutions that affecting the way as a corporation is directed, administered or controlled” [Cadbury 1992] 3
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Several authors [Luna et al. 2010; Qumer and Henderson-Sellers 2008; Roosmalen and Hoppenbrouwers 2008; Sun et al. 2005] have pointed out the lack of methods, techniques and tools to help people and enterprises to achieve the business goals, means by the governance issues, in an agile way independent from the business area. At same time, many authors [Banihashemi and Liu 2012; Bartenschlager and Goeken 2010; Heston and Phifer 2011; Radnor and Johnston 2013] claim that the governance practices, models, guides and frameworks are most of them bureaucratic, time consuming and having no guidance details of how to implement and deploy the necessary management instruments and governance mechanism, such as ITIL [Mendel 2004], COBIT [Gerke and Ridley 2009], among others. These processes, models, guides and practices will be denominated “conventional or traditional governance”, by this study, according the shortcomings identified in their context. Over the last few years, Agile methodologies [Dybå and Dingsøyr 2008] have been gaining traction in industry and adding competitiveness and dynamism to the process of software development, through initiatives where the principles of communication and collaboration are essential Dubinsky and Kruchten [2009]. Moreover, Dubinsky and Kruchten [2009] and Dubinsky et al. [2010] highlight that Software Development Governance (SDG) has emerged in the last few years to deal with establishing the structures, policies, controls, and measurements for communication and for decision rights, to ensure the success of software development organizations. Recently, agile governance has been proposed [Cheng et al. 2009; Luna et al. 2010; Qumer 2007], which provides the wide application of principles and values of Agile Software Development [Beck et al. 2001] to the conventional governance processes. Luna [2009] has developed a framework for agile governance, in order to implement and improve governance in organizations, called MAnGve. This framework is focused to the deployment process, as a catalyzer to accelerate the deployment of governance. The MAnGve framework is designed to alleviate the lack of practical focus found in conventional governance models [MAnGve 2009]. The MAnGve is a framework based on an agile life cycle, seeking to translate the principles, values and practices from Agile Software Development to IT governance paradigm. However, altogether the agile governance phenomena still remain unexplored in depth, and are currently the focus of the first author's doctoral research.
1.3.Benefits The audience will have the opportunity to experience and discuss the following topics upon the context of framework and its case study:
What is MAnGve framework and how it can be useful?
Where to begin the implementation of governance in the enterprise?
How to adapt/customize the existing bodies of knowledge to the reality of their business?
What should be prioritized to achieve results as quickly as possible?
How to implement effective and responsive governance in order to deliver value faster, better, and cheaper to the business?
1.4.Agenda During the presentation we will address the following topics:
Agile Governance: this session will introduce the Agile Governance paradigm, its origins and metaprinciples.
MAnGve overview: at this topic we will present the framework overview, lifecycle, architecture, components, practices and roles.
A practical case study: in this section we will characterize the target organization, discuss the motivation to adopt the framework, present the results and discuss the benefits achieved.
Conclusion: finally, we will address the relevance of this initiative to the industry and government, and discuss important aspects such as: effectiveness, facility for replication, strength of evidence, implications for research and practices, limitations and future works.
2.Audience This topic is essential to CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, executives, managers, government agents; team leaders, IT professionals who wish to make their organizations more competitive and profitable, as well as scholars and researchers who have special interest on related topics. They are busy, restless, and impatient, and usually read books about business, governance and management, looking for tools to improve the results of their corporations. No previous knowledge about technologies is required. However, knowledge about processes, services and management may help the attendant to take better advantage of the content of the session.
3.Speaker’s Bio Alexandre Luna is Ph.D. candidate of computer science at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Center of Informatics (CIn), Brazil; as well as a Visiting Scholar of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The University of British Columbia (UBC), in Vancouver, Canada. He holds a M.Sc. in computer 3
science, a MBA in IT management and a B.Eng. in Chemical Engineering. He holds certification in ITIL, COBIT, CSM and he is PMI member. He is a Consultant Analyst of Governmental Agency of Information Technology of the Pernambuco (ATI-PE). He is a researcher of the Project Management Research Group (GP2) from CIn-UFPE, of the Software Engineering Architecture Laboratory (SEAL) Research Group from ECE-UBC, and of the Research Group in Technology on Health (TIS) at the Clinics Hospital (HC-UFPE). His main research interests include: Agile Governance, IT Governance, Information Systems, Agile Methodologies, Software Engineering, Project Management, Telemedicine, e-Business, Service Management and MAnGve.
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