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## 3. Description 

## 3.1. The Need for ICT Governance 

The need for a comprehensive and well working ICT Governance model comes from a combination of several factors. 

❖ ECHA uses a sizable proportion of its financial resources on IT. The EU Financial Regulation and implementing rules  stipulate sound financial management  as one of the key principles, requiring efficiency and effectiveness of investments and making economical choices in budget implementation. 

❖ ECHA’s capability to build and run IT service and products is limited in both financial and human resources, with the demand from internal and external stakeholders and customers constantly outpacing the available capacity. 

❖ Building IT is a complex endeavour. There is a wide range of expertise required to turn customers’ and stakeholders’ requirements, ideas and wishe s into high quality, ready- for-consumption IT services and products. This requires that a large number of actors with different expertise profiles need to work together in the right way at the right time to produce successful results. 

ECHA’s capacity has t o be utilised for the right purpose and in the right manner to maximise the benefits for the Agency. All investments have to be properly aligned with the mission and strategic direction of the Agency, investment proposals have to be well analysed and provide a sound financial manner of fulfilling the business needs. 

Accurate planning and sufficient risk controls have to be in place to reduce any waste of capacity. In this kind of complex environment, it takes effort to foresee and manage potential risks to quality, time or resources via proper planning and risk management practices; however, this effort is worth spending since typically the cost of any of the risks realising far exceeds the effort to avoid them. 

The complexity of building IT calls for clear organisation and methods of working: timing and synchronising the different steps in the work and ensuring that capacity is not wasted on misunderstandings, duplicate work or any other side effects of disorganised operations. 

Having said that, IT needs to retain sufficient flexibility to keep the agility to react and adjust to changing situations and circumstances. 

In essence, quality IT requires governance to ensure alignment of decision making with the strategic direction of the organisation, to apply the principle of sound financial management, to manage change properly, to provide the frame for IT work and to give the necessary guidelines for it. 

## 3.2. Overall Summary of ECHA ICT Governance 

Working successfully in IT requires more than an in-depth kn owledge of one’s own specific area and a good understanding of 

• the overall frame of governance in order to understand the larger context 

• the directly interacting areas in order to work with them successfully 

