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As a Marketing Message, ‘Governance’ Now Rules


Is it just a new way to say ‘development tool’?

By Jennifer deJong
March 15, 2006 — 
Always on the lookout for a better buzzword, companies that sell tools for development teams have latched on to a new favorite: governance.

From “application governance” to “change governance” to “SOA governance,” or the broader “IT governance,” there are a handful of variations on the theme.

“It’s overwhelming in the last three months,” said Carey Schwaber, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. “The terms don’t necessarily correspond to products at all.” One reason why “governance” is so widely used, is that “it’s broad enough to mean just about anything,” added David Kelly, president of Upside Research, in Newton, Mass.

But analysts also said tool makers have a legitimate reason to use the word. It reflects a growing reality: Senior business executives are scrutinizing application development and other IT projects more closely than ever before, holding managers who head such efforts increasingly accountable for costs and delivery dates. “Governance implies strong management, good control and fiscal responsibility—all virtues that have become incredibly important in this post-Enron, SOX [Sarbanes-Oxley]-oriented, regulated environment,” said Kelly. “Who wouldn’t want to have good governance over their IT, application or SOA investments?”

Regardless of what you call it, the recent shift toward service-oriented architectures has increased the need for the governance, said Kelly. “SOA is much more complicated than traditional programming models. It requires efficient utilization and re-utilization of resources.” That’s difficult to do without a governance strategy, he said.

New Name for Dev Tools?
Governance isn’t just about managing resources; it’s about managing the behavior of people, said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at Waltham, Mass.-based ZapThink. It boils down to four things, he said: establishing and communicating policies, enforcing rules, providing visibility to management and mitigating deviations.

But in reality, the analysts agreed, it’s often just another way to say “development tool.” For example, a company that makes change management tools may position its offerings under the “change governance” umbrella. And sometimes a solution for “SOA governance” is really just a Web services registry. “They want to make it interesting to a higher-level audience,” said Schwaber. “I think that is a challenge for any vendor.”

“Application governance” typically refers to status reports that tell top execs where development projects stand in terms of delivery dates, defect rates and other metrics they find meaningful, analysts said. While such reports are aimed at management, they are likely based on data pulled from life-cycle environments used by development teams, such as those offered by Borland, IBM, Microsoft and Serena.

“Application governance” is sometimes used interchangeably with “IT governance,” which refers to the oversight of not just development efforts but also other IT projects, such as server rollouts, noted Schwaber.

Who Started It?
It’s difficult to pinpoint when the term governance was first used in relationship to development and other IT projects.

“I heard it first from Mercury,” said Schwaber, referring to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company that sells performance and quality assurance tools, among other offerings. “They popularized IT governance, at least for development organizations,” she said.

“I don’t know if we were first. But we were early,” said Mercury chief marketing officer Christopher Lochhead. The idea behind governance is a simple one, he said. “Much like a board of directors governs a company, an IT organization sets priorities and processes to manage itself accordingly.”

The term governance fills a need for organizations to find ways to quantify and qualify the IT or application investments they’re making, added Kelly. “It’s certainly overused, but it’s not going away anytime soon.”


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