The IT Governance Evangelist

It is inappropriate, if not impossible, to talk about IT Governance without focusing on transparency. The term is used again and again and has become an aspiration for IT organizations that increasingly understand the importance of providing and sharing information with the business. This is critical for the decision-making process. I would bet that providing transparency is likely a goal of your enterprise as well.

So given its prevalence, I encounter and use the word frequently. Each time I do, I pause to reflect on the use of this word in IT. When somebody says, "Steve, you're transparent," I don't take it as a compliment. I don't aspire to be transparent because unless you're a window, it is not a compliment. Yet when we use the term in IT, it is a stated goal, despite the fact that if you ask most business units, they will tell you they can already "see through IT."  Personally, I prefer the word "visibility." I entice folks to provide visibility into IT decision-making and visibility to information regarding IT's capability and performance.

I share this view of the word with my audiences and it is always good for a chuckle. I say I intend to research the genesis of its usage in IT to find out who first coined the term. I finally took the time to do so. Enter the word in a Google search and you get tons of hits, but I could not find who said it first. When all else fails, there's Wikipedia.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Transparency (optics), the physical property of allowing the transmission of light through a material

Literal uses:

• Electromagnetically induced transparency, an effect in which a medium that is normally opaque at a particular wavelength is caused to become temporarily transparent
• Pentimento, an alteration in a painting, often revealed with growing transparency in paints with age
• Transparency (photography), a still, positive image created on a transparent base using photochemical means
• Transparency (projection), a thin sheet of transparent material for use with an overhead projector

Metaphorical meanings can amount to clear visibility, but also the opposite, invisibility (in particular of irrelevant details).

Transparency may also refer to:

In computing and mathematics:

• Transparency (computing), user and engineering design considerations, including
• Location transparency if the names used to identify network resources are independent of both the user's location and the resource location
• Network transparency if there is no difference between the centralized database and the distributed database
• Transparency (data compression), the ideal result of lossy data compression
• Transparency (telecommunication), the property by which a transmission system passes a signal through without changing its form or content
• Transparency (graphic), for overlay and translucency in PNG, GIF, and TIFF files
• Transparency (pseudo), or background translucency in the X or X11 Window System
• Referential transparency in programming designates a deterministic function

Notice the one sentence above in regard to its metaphorical use. It can amount to clear visibility (our intent when using it in IT), but also the opposite - invisibility! This is the only reference to how we use the term in IT. In fact, the subsequent computing and mathematic usage examples lean toward invisibility.

In my opinion, this is yet another example of our affinity with jargon. We have this apparent need to invent words to convey our message. Our desire is to be more open, forthright and straightforward, so we invent a new meaning for an existing word!

So I implore every IT organization to establish IT Governance and the associated governance processes and mechanisms to provide visibility into IT decision-making and the information used to make those decisions. They need to provide this visibility to their customers, their constituents and to their stakeholders. (Stakeholder: The person assisting the vampire killer.)

If you got to the end of this blog, you are a geek like me.