Governance? In this context I mean the command, control and oversight of a company’s “IT Estate”. From an Enterprise Architecture point of view this could mean business processes as well as more (more formally associated with IT) Software Applications, Data and Technology.
The point being that without formal, committed and central governance of all the software (bespoke and bought), hardware, platforms (server farms, mainframes …), supporting middleware, integration patterns, then there is clear and present risk that this ensemble piece will grow then mutate past a certain size into a complex inventory list of poorly understood point to point connected systems.
From then on changes to this mess become more and more difficult to do (read take longer, cost more). More and more compromises are made with the User experience or business system ‘journey’ and satisfying new Business Requirements becomes increasingly difficult. Just getting any small thing changed and deployed at all becomes a challenge.
A lot of words probably better illustrated by a couple of diagrams:
Touchdown! That’s a really cool way of putting it!