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

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 05:29

Opinion and Analysis

Mark Toomey next described the focus that Infonomics has. "We've decided that we focus not on helping the technologists do the technology."

"We focus on all the other things: helping the leaders of the organization, particularly the top-level executives and the board, understand the part that they have to play in making sure that all of the activities are actually done to produce a result with information technology. And that set of activities we call collectively corporate governance of information technology."

He explained that in about 2003 he became involved in the development of an Australian standard for corporate governance of information technology. That standard is known as AS 8015."

"It was published in early 2005, and during 2006 it started a journey to adoption as an international standard. That journey reached its final climax in June 2008, when international standard ISO/IEC 38500 was finally published."

"That standard is very consistent with the Australian standard that was its forerunner, and it is written for the board of directors and the top executives of an organization to explain to them the fact that they have a responsibility to govern the use of IT and to provide the m with a very simple framework that they can use to perform that role of governing IT."

"One of the key elements in that standard is the recognition that, to govern the use of IT, no director and no top executive actually needs to even be able to turn on a computer let alone understand how computers are programmed!"

"Instead of asking the IT Manager or the Chief Information Officer or the Project Director technical questions about the project, and when all the problems are going to be solved, all the board needs to ask is: What's the business case for continuing?"

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