IT Governance: How does Team System support this...

After a few queries from customers, as well as some personal reflection, I'm starting to think that some information about how Team System, and more specifically how Team Foundation Server, can support the important aspects of IT Governance. Surprisingly (or not really), there is not a lot of information that's been brought together on this topic.

TFS has a number of things in it to support IT Governance. Jeff Martin from TD Bank Financial group initially peaked my interest on this, and I started to think about the following:

=Data Wharehouse: Since TFS can store all sorts of process related information from the client tools and other server components in a business intelligence database, mining this information is easy, see:

=TFS Reports: Which, are grouped by Team Project, and make use of SQL Reporting Services. Each Team Project set of reports can be different, depending on the:

=Process (Methodoloy) Template: Which, through customization, can completely control the experience of different roles in the software development lifecycle. The template will include a set of reports of importance within it, and usually relates to an underlying :

=Methodology: Which characterizes the workflow, groups, meaning, repetitive processes and tasks, of the software development lifecycle. The Methodology templates in the current TFS Beta 3 referesh include some pretty extensive user assistance, which relates roles to work in the process, as well as how to use which TFS reports to understand what is happening on a project.

Joel Semeniuk (MVP, Regional Director Extrodianaire) has an excellent post on this on his blog: Team System and Process Governance . I really like this post, and hope you read it.

I'd like to start going beyond this, and looking across project, and entire organizations, and seeing how the use of team system features can provide some rollup data that can contribute to understanding how an organization is running, and how this information can also be used as input into making an organization better.