Corporate governance of IT - Critical for all organizations, large or small (iTWire podcast)

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 05:29

Opinion and Analysis

In this iTWire podcast interview, Mark Toomey of Infonomics explains why IT governance is so critical to organizations of any size, and how it is non-IT executives and directors who play the key role in effective governance.

Herein lie some very important messages for all board members and non-IT executives who are involved with governing the use IT in any sort of organization, commercial or otherwise, from the very largest to the very smallest.

Mark Toomey is managing director of Infonomics, which focuses on helping organizations ensure that their use of information technology is efficient and acceptable. "That's what you get when you have effective governance of IT," he says.

"Our specialty is corporate governance of IT, helping the people who own and run the company make sure that IT is doing for them what they need."

Infonomics has clients in Australia and overseas, but in between his overseas trips to run workshops and conferences I managed to catch him to record this interview. have no business relationship with Infonomics, but I regard the matter of IT governance to be of such importance that I simply had to catch Mark Toomey and record this interview for you.

I hope that my efforts in producing this podcast are not in vain, and that you to pass it on to the non-IT top executives and directors of your organization responsible for running your organization. Of course, CIOs and other IT technology-oriented people also will do well to heed the underlying messages, but it is not primarily directed at IT practitioners.

The essence of corporate governance of IT was summed up by Mark's statement that "A lot of the problems that exist in the use of IT today come not from technology issues but from organizational and management issues."

"That has enabled me to focus on this question of what are the governance issues for organizations around making sure that IT actually works properly."

"I became involved in governance of IT around the year 2000, and it was pretty much a follow-though of experiences of the previous years, where I had encountered a number of situations where the technology itself was just fine but the organization that were using the technology were treating it as a black box rather than as a tool of business."

"Through looking at organizations that were having problems with projects and with operational systems, it became fairly clear to me that there was a big gap between the Chief Information Officer and the chairman of the board,  where the conversations weren't able to happen effectively because pretty much people were talking different languages."

"The board thought that it needed to ask questions about technology, when in fact what the board needed to do was ask questions about how the technology was being used. That's quite a different set of questions."

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