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This is the first of a series of posts on Governance in Lotus Domino/Notes. What is IT Governance? IT Governance specifies decision making authority and accountability to encourage desirable behaviors in the use of IT. The result to this is that successful IT governance enables IT to deliver some variation on these 4 IT Objectives:

• Efficient and cost effective services
• Alignment with the business
• Risk management within acceptable levels
• Compliance with company policies and external regulations

Why Governance is Important: Lotus Notes is easy to use and allows rapid application development, but very few organizations know how many applications are in place, where they are, or what they do. Further, changes to applications are made ad-hoc and many times directly in Production with no accountability and no change management process. The result of this lack of control is far-reaching, including:

• Lack of automated processes leading to errors and bottlenecks
• Poor end user satisfaction from the application
• Slow turn-around of change requests by development
• Costly downtime happens more often
• Difficulties in functioning as a development team with no version control system
• Disruptive, time-consuming, costly and labor intensive regulatory audits
• Lack of global visibility into security and auditing of ACL settings across the entire enterprise increases risk

This leads to wasted resources, wasted space, and wasted opportunity for business benefits. Ultimately the potential ROI from Notes will not be achieved, which sadly has the effect of causing management to consider other platforms. However, given the cost of “rip and replace” strategies, the only sensible option is to establish a set of fresh policies for your Lotus Notes and Domino platform. In my next post I shall cover “How the IT Landscape Has Changed (The Need for IT Governance)”