Designing of an IT Governance Master Plan

About Canal de Isabel II

Canal de Isabel II is a public-sector water company with over 150 years of experience in the water industry. The main objective of its more than 2,500 workers is to carry out the tasks required for integrated water management, and to maintain the quality and safety of the service.

Key Challenge

Quint’s goal was to draw up a roadmap that would help improve the maturity of IT governance, based on 3 factors: benefits, risks and costs. To this end, a plan was devised, consisting of four project programs, aimed at enhancing the different areas of IT governance. A new control model was also established to measure benefits and facilitate decision-making while at the same time addressing the risks faced by the company.

The Approach

The Governance Master Plan was designed using the Quint Governance Model, which enabled the information gathered from the different business units to be analyzed from several perspectives (strategy, functions, metrics, processes and tools). Nineteen improvement initiatives were identified for implementation within four years. These initiatives were then divided across four programs for the short, medium and long term, to be updated annually.

• Program 1: Strengthen the strategic vision of the IT organization and its alignment with the business to improve the organizational structures that facilitate the relationship and communication between IT and the business.
• Program 2: Improve functions for aligning supply and demand in order to create the required functions and strengthen existing ones, enabling the identification and training of the best candidates for decision-making roles.
• Program 3: Improve processes and metrics so that they can provide the necessary control mechanisms for improving efficiency and for aligning IT objectives with the business.
• Program 4: Introduce a service and solutions catalog for managing business knowledge, which will allow implementation of the tools required for the effective execution of the previously established processes and metrics.

The Results

The main results are seen in the gradual and balanced increase of the level of governance maturity in recent years, and reflect the following achievements:

• Greater involvement and coordination of the different IT areas and a reorganization of internal resources towards higher-value functions by outsourcing operative tasks to external third parties.
• A more efficient and structured IT governance, with improvements to the demand management process, better alignment with the business units and more well-defined channels, enabling the IT organization to be more proactive in proposing solutions to the business.