Fiduciaries: There are three groups associated with Fiduciary Management: Senior Business Management, Senior IT Management, and IT Practitioners. The extent that Senior Business Management participates in the process is dependent upon the needs and information base of the organization. The final group (Practitioners) is generally associated with the Assurance portion of the process, but can be involved in some Governance decisions.

Asset Development: This focus area is related to the creation of a new or improved computing solution that will be used by the business. While this is usually software, it is not always the case. The processes and procedures to support this activity are readily available and well defined.

Asset Conservancy: This focus area is related to the nurturing of the implemented services that form the computing engine of the business. These services generally take the form of purchased equipment and related expenses. There are relatively few processes and procedures to support these activities, and as a result is a generally neglected area in the Fiduciary Management process.

Governance

The Fiduciary Management process begins in Governance. In this phase of the process, the Fiduciaries join together to form the decision making panel. They are represented by Senior IT, Senior Business, and operations personnel (or their representatives). When needed, the panel will be joined by those individuals that provide information for the decision making process.

Each of the stakeholders in the panel will have their own set of concerns, issues, and inputs that need to be addressed as part of the governance process. All discussion will be done in the context of the Service Delivery issues. These issues relate to: fiscal constraints, service delivery life cycle, business and processing demand, business strategy, and risk to the business.

The decisions of the governance panel flow into the IT business plan.

Assurance

The Assurance phase of Fiduciary Management is on-going and has two parts associated with it: Asset Development and Asset Conservancy. Asset Development is the process that creates new solutions for Service Delivery. Asset Conservancy is the nurturing of Service Delivery solutions once they are in production.

In the past few years Asset Development is the area that has received the most attention due to its time and cost constraints. Asset Development metrics consist of those values used to determine the progress of a project toward completion. Included in those metrics are information about cost, staffing, risk, and other project management issues. Since this part of Assurance is so widely known, its output measures actually determine the value that will be returned to the business in the form of a Service Delivery.

The other aspect of Assurance is Asset Conservancy, and is not really widely known. Generally speaking, this area is almost completely ignored unless something goes wrong. What should be noted is this is where most of the IT assets are located, and often times represents the majority of IT costs. You would not know it because most of the assets are off the IT books (capital assets).

Asset Conservancy is Capacity Management with the injection of business costs. The net result is maximum value returned from the installed IT resources, while at the same time providing Service Delivery costs in a manner that is business centric.

The Business Cost and Business Value information is returned to the IT Governance process for consideration by the governance panel.