1. Home
  2. Governance and Portfolio Management
  3. Governance Project Request
  4. Scope / Definitions

Scope / Definitions

IT Governance at Emory is a transparent set of processes designed to consistently receive, prioritize, and evaluate IT work in a public, inclusive manner. The process is for project-based IT requests only and does not circumvent current departmental procurement and purchasing approval processes. The subcommittee structure is not designed to review requests for permanent staffing or funding increases.

Scope

Work reviewed and evaluated by the University Governance structure includes:

  • A new or significant upgrade to a customer-facing product or service utilized as an enterprise offering; or
  • An integration with an enterprise service or data source.

Although every effort has been made to establish clear criteria, there are times when a request may require significant time and resources from enterprise teams or systems or when it may be beneficial to review a request through the governance process.  We rely on our committee chairs, project sponsors, and the community itself to help us identify these instances.  If there is a question as to whether something should go through governance, please send the request to our ITSC coordinator at:  ITSC_Request@emory.mail.onmicrosoft.com.

Some project-based work is not reviewed or evaluated by University Governance, but is considered an "internal" project for Office of Information Technology (OIT). These projects include:

  • Upgrades to existing infrastructure and applications (server virtualization, storage refreshes, networks, etc.) that have a minimal customer impact beyond scheduled downtime.
  • Integration for authentication purposes (Shibboleth, InCommon).
  • Projects that are internal to the business operations of a school or unit and have minimal to no impact on an enterprise system or service.
  • Fee-for-service requests where the customer provides the funding.  For example,
    • A workflow solution that supports an individual school or unit based process.
    • Request for a project manager or a data analyst (recharged to the sponsor) to support an individual unit project.
  • Projects initiated as Research and Development. These projects are not intended for production or POC usage, but are efforts to learn and expand our technologies and services.
  • Research and recommendations that require a discovery phase to establish the direction, costs, or technology platform.

Structure

The governance structure is comprised of subcommittees and one steering committee (ITSC).

Membership is intended to be far-reaching and to fully engage as many areas of the University community as possible. The role of each subcommittee is to review and approve or deny IT initiatives pertinent to their areas that involve enterprise IT applications or data.

A request for work may or may not include a request for additional funding. Work should be evaluated and approved or denied based on its merits and value to the University community, and not on funding concerns.

Definitions

  • Enterprise is two or more school-level organization entities with Emory University.
  • A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. Temporary means that the project has a distinct start and end date. Unique means that the project's end result (function, service or application) is not otherwise available by current IT functions, services or applications.