Review and Improve Your IT Policy Library
Create policies for the risks that matter most to your organization.
- Your policies are out of date, disorganized, and complicated. They don’t reflect current regulations and don’t actually mitigate your organization’s current IT risks.
- Your policies are difficult to understand, aren’t easy to find, or aren’t well monitored and enforced for compliance. As a result, your employees don’t care about your policies.
- Policy issues are taking up too much of your time and distracting you from the real issues you need to address.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
A dynamic and streamlined policy approach will:
- Right-size policies to address the most critical IT risks.
- Clearly lay out a step-by-step process to complete daily tasks in compliance.
- Obtain policy adherence without having to be “the police.”
To accomplish this, the policy writer must engage their audience early to gather input on IT policies, increase policy awareness, and gain buy-in early in the process.
Impact and Result
- Develop more effective IT policies. Clearly express your policy goals and objectives, standardize the approach to employee problem solving, and write policies your employees will actually read.
- Improve risk coverage. Ensure full coverage on the risk landscape, including legal regulations, and establish a method for reporting, documenting, and communicating risks.
- Improve employee compliance. Empathize with your employees and use policy to educate, train, and enable them instead of restricting them.
Review and Improve Your IT Policy Library
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to find out how to write better policies that mitigate the risks you care about and get the business to follow them, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.
1. Assess
Assess your risk landscape and design a plan to update your policy network based on your most critical risks.
2. Draft and implement
Use input from key stakeholders to write clear, consistent, and concise policies that people will actually read and understand. Then publish them and start generating policy awareness.
3. Monitor, enforce, revise
Use your policies to create a compliance culture in your organization, set KPIs, and track policy effectiveness.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
9.3/10
Overall Impact
$20,833
Average $ Saved
10
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
Nelson
Guided Implementation
8/10
$1,600
4
Carver County, MN
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
5
NorthCentral Missouri College
Guided Implementation
10/10
$2,000
20
Mercury Insurance Service
Guided Implementation
9/10
$58,899
10
Dodge County
Guided Implementation
9/10
$10,000
9
Great Lakes Cheese
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
N/A
Cross Country Mortgage, Inc.
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
N/A
Asahi Intecc USA
Guided Implementation
10/10
$50,000
50
City Of South Fulton
Guided Implementation
7/10
N/A
N/A
Georgia State Accounting Office
Guided Implementation
9/10
N/A
5
Sirtex
Guided Implementation
10/10
$63,667
50
Highland Shores Children's Aid Society
Guided Implementation
8/10
$10,000
16
Financial Services Regulator Authority of Ontario
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
N/A
IT Management & Policies
Find the right balance between risk mitigation and operational efficiency.
This course makes up part of the Strategy & Governance Certificate.
- Course Modules: 5
- Estimated Completion Time: 2-2.5 hours
- Featured Analysts:
- David Yackness, Sr. Research Director, CIO Practice
- James Alexander, SVP of Research and Advisory, CIO Practice
Onsite Workshop: Review and Improve Your IT Policy Library
Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Establish & Assess
The Purpose
- Identify the pain points associated with IT policies.
- Establish the policy development process.
- Begin formulating a plan to re-design the policy network.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Establish the policy process.
- Highlight key issues and pain points regarding policy.
- Assign roles and responsibilities.
Activities
Outputs
Introduce workshop.
Identify the current pain points with policy management.
- List of issues and pain points for policy management
Establish high-level goals around policy management.
- Set of six to ten goals for policy management
Select metrics to measure achievement of goals.
- Baseline and target measured value
Create an IT policy working group (ITPWG).
- Amended steering committee or ITPWG charter
Define the scope and purpose of the ITPWG.
- Completed RACI chart
- Documented policy development process
Module 2: Assess Your Risk Landscape & Map Policies to Risks; Create a Policy Action Plan
The Purpose
- Identify key risks.
- Develop an understanding of which risks are most critical.
- Design a policy network that best mitigates those risks.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Use a risk-driven approach to decide which policies need to be written or updated first.
Activities
Outputs
Identify risks at a high level.
- Ranked list of IT’s risk scenarios
Assess each identified risk scenario on impact and likelihood.
- Prioritized list of IT risks (simplified risk register)
Map current and required policies to risks.
Assess policy effectiveness.
Create a policy action plan.
- Policy action plan
Select policies to be developed during workshop.
Module 3: Develop Policies
The Purpose
Outline what key features make a policy effective and write policies that mitigate the most critical IT risks.
Key Benefits Achieved
Write policies that work and get them approved.
Activities
Outputs
Define the policy audience, constraints, and in-scope and out-of-scope requirements for a policy.
Draft two to four policies
- Drafted policies
Module 4: Create a Policy Communication and Implementation Plan and Monitor & Reassess the Portfolio
The Purpose
Build an understanding of how well the organization’s value creation activities are being supported.
Key Benefits Achieved
Identify an area or capability that requires improvement.
Activities
Outputs
Review draft policies and update if necessary.
- Final draft policies
Create a policy communication plan.
- Policy communications plan
Select KPIs.
- KPI tracking log
Review root-cause analysis techniques.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Try Our Guided Implementations
Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation #1 - Assess
- Call #1 - Scope your policy development plan.
- Call #2 - Discuss policy governance roles and objectives.
- Call #3 - Assess the high-level risks to be addressed by policy.
Guided Implementation #2 - Draft & Implement
- Call #1 - Identify stakeholders and plan to gather their input.
- Call #2 - Discuss critical components of policies.
- Call #3 - Plan sign-off and publication of finished policies.
Guided Implementation #3 - Monitor, Enforce, Revise
- Call #1 - Discuss policies in the context of company culture.
- Call #2 - Review key performance indicators.
- Call #3 - Perform root-cause analysis on non-compliance.
Contributors
- Kevin Vigil, IT Director, Southwest Care Center
- Kathleen Coyle, IT Policy and Process Maturity Manager, Moog Inc.
- Michael Deskin, Policy and Technical Writer, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
- Edward Kizer, Policy and Procedure Officer, Shelby County Government, Tennessee
- J.J. Campbell, CIO, Agriculture Financial Services Corporation
- Philippe Delisle, CIO, Englobe
- Alison Robinson, CIO, University of Maryland
- Mike Hughes, Principal Director, Haines-Watts UK
- Ilir Azizi, Manager, Ministry of the Attorney General, Ontario
- One anonymous Senior IT Policy Analyst, Government Agency
