Published: July 06 2011, 12:26 AM | no comments
by Steve Romero

This is a rather momentous blog post for me. Though all of my posts are from my heart, this one is about a labor of my love. Today, my company, CA Technologies, issued an official press release http://bit.ly/jDzpGY announcing the publication of my new book, "Eliminating ‘Us and Them' - Making IT and the Business One." Though the book took me a year to write, and another six months to publish, it was actually thirty years in the making. So today marks a very significant milestone in my career.

I have been traveling the world evangelizing the power and promise of IT governance to our customers, prospects and constituents for almost five years. I now have more than a half dozen presentations I deliver with great regularity and each of them is founded in three disciplines I am convinced are critical to enterprise success: IT governance, process and process management, and organizational behavior. When I crafted my presentations, I did not intentionally set out to include aspects of governance, process, and behavioral management. The fact that there are elements of each of these disciplines in all of my presentations is much more a result of evolution than it was conclusion.

I became a process enthusiast very early in my IT career, more than thirty years ago to be precise. I became a fan of governance (though at the time I did not know it was governance) more than twenty years ago. And I became a believer in organizational behavior driven by enterprise culture a mere eight years ago. Though I have been a devotee of each of these subjects for some time, I did not address them as a collective until very recently.

Shortly after becoming a full-time IT governance evangelist for CA Technologies, my best friend Mike Nelson started bugging me about writing a book. He had heard my views on IT governance in countless conversations which all ended in him saying, "You should write book." After presenting (and by association, testing) my ideas on thousands of people around the world, I finally decided to heed his advice.

So eighteen months ago, I started writing my book on IT governance. As I started capturing my thoughts, I found I could not talk about IT governance without talking about process. Though all of my presentations have included a nod to process and process management, writing a book on IT governance necessitated a deeper dive into process. My belief in the absolute dependency between process and enterprise culture and organizational behavior meant my book would need to cover that topic as well.

My initial intention was to write something for my fellow IT brethren, in the hopes of describing those things I am certain will enable them to succeed. It was only after the initial manuscript was complete that the purpose, focus, and audience of the book became completely clear. With the help of my soon to be Lead Editor Jeffrey Pepper, I stumbled upon my deep-seeded beliefs in the need for governance, process and organizational behavior to coalesce into a single overarching construct.

After reading my first draft, Jeffrey was convinced the audience of the book should not be limited to members of the IT organization. In one of our first meetings, he challenged me with questions intended to dig deeper into what I was trying to say because he was convinced my message was applicable to the entire enterprise. During the course of his ‘peppering' (pun intended) I explained the need for the business to take a greater role in technology decisions (IT governance) and how IT needed to foster and enable business participation in technology decisions. I told Jeffrey how the business and IT need to make work possible and practical and enable people to work together by mastering the art and science of process and process management. I described how this decision-making and process won't ever be successful without addressing enterprise culture and organizational behavior. I told him how sound IT governance, optimal processes and the right culture and behaviors were the only chance of conquering the divide between IT and the business. I told him how IT and the business need to stop acting like they are separate from one another and how I was sick of their "us and them" relationship. I told him I wanted to eliminate "us and them" and make IT and the business "one." Eliminating ‘Us and Them' was born.

I'll be blogging more on my book in the coming weeks and if you pick up a copy, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist