3100 professionals, 95 countries, 21 options and the 7 IT related business issues that matter most

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 05 August 2008 18:12

IT Industry - Market

ISACA, the acronym formerly known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association, has been busy surveying IT professionals from nearly 100 countries to reveal the top 7 business issues that are impacted by technology, and will continue to be for the next 12 months. It would be mean of us not to share...

ISACA is a non-profit association based in the US but serving a global membership of some 86,000 IT governance professionals. Despite going down the Prince/Symbol road and becoming an acronym, it still manages to produce interesting reports every now and then.

This one is certainly a 'now' moment. ISACA surveyed IT professionals from across the globe, the geographic breakdown being:

North America 37 percent, Europe/Africa 32 percent, Asia 22 percent, Central/South America 5 percent and Oceania 4 percent.

Given a list of 21 different business issue options, the respondents were asked to choose the one that was most impacted by technology. This produced a final list of 7 which were ranked as follows in order of most importance:
 

1. Regulatory compliance, specifically protecting PII and implementing transaction monitoring
2. Enterprise-based management and IT governance
3. Information security management
4. Disaster recovery/business continuity
5. IT value management
6. Challenges of managing IT risks
7. Compliance with financial reporting

 
Greg Grocholski is a senior finance director at Dow Chemical, but also happens to be the chair of ISACA's Assurance Committee. He told us that the cost of losing or compromising integrity of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is leading to a renewed focus on information security.

"The survey shows that 81 percent of the 1,600 respondents who named information security management as a number 3 concern said that security risks are not fully known or are only partially assessed using technology" Grocholski said.

The study went on to reveal that there are still a lot of enterprises which are not adequately prepared for data disaster. Some 80 percent of the 1,500 ISACA members who said that business continuity management was the most important issue, resulting in its number 4 spot in the list, also said their business managers and owners were not fully aware of their responsibilities to maintain the ability to perform critical business functions in the event of a disaster.

Confidence inspiring stuff. Not!