information

IT Governance and Shareholder Value

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I note that the IT Governance Institute (it’s chaired by Tony Hayes, my predecessor as Chair of the ITM COE for CPA Australia) has released a “Guide to IT Value @ Risk”. The guide will be found here, while the IT Governance Institute can be found here.

IT Governance is about the way that the information technology business function is managed, particularly in the context of the board’s responsibilities. IT Governance is one of the major work programs of the Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence for 2005.

Information Systems In The Old School Yard

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In another life, I worked for independent schools (Anglican Church Grammar School and St Margaret’s Anglican Girls’ School), and in so doing I came to a good appreciation of what schools try to do with what they’ve got available (i.e. a lot with not much). In my post-school career, I have had occasion to visit schools and evaluate how the schools organise and run their information technology.

Each quarter my firm (BDO Kendalls) publishes a newsletter specifically to the education sector. In the autumn edition, I was asked to write an article entitled “Maximising Education Technology“, and so here it is, published in all its glory.

As always, feedback welcome.

Could You Say That Again?

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Going back through my old papers, I discovered this (rather more accessible, although it’s still research) version of my thesis on Information Request Ambiguity. A riveting read? Probably not, but it’s a good source for anyone wanting to take a look at the theoretical underpinnings of internal communication and its potential commercial effects.

In case you’re wondering, information request ambiguity is when there is ambiguity in a request for a report to be written by a third party. Information Request Ambiguity is a mouthful, but it’s probably more professional-sounding than calling it the “Are you sure that’s what you want?” factor.

This paper was presented at the International Conference in Information Systems in 2001. We are repeating the experiment and hoping to publish in a first-tier journal “real soon now”. The main rationale for the research was to identify the different types of ambiguity, and what their likely effects are (e.g. accuracy, mistaken reporting, etc).

Information Systems, Security, and Fraud

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I note that John Halliday (a colleague at BDO Kendalls – Director IS Audit) has written an overview article on information systems security and fraud. This is a good short article raising the link between IS security, governance structures, and organisational fraud. John is promising a series of articles in this newsletter, so I am sure there is more to come here.

From what I understand, this article also dovetails nicely with a seminar that was run on 18th April 2005.

SME IT Health Checklist

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One of the things I do in my “spare” time is chair the Information Technology & Management Centre of Excellence for CPA Australia (since 2002). This has responsibility for looking at over-the-horizon issues in information technology (as they relate to the accounting profession).

One of the interesting articles we published recently (thanks to Shauna Kelly who wrote it, I did review it before publishing although I think my most incisive comment was “I see” and “Great!”) was an IT Health Checklist for SME’s. A good starting point, at the very least – unfortunately you’ll need to be an Australian CPA or know a CPA to get the actual PDF (hey, there must be a CPA around here somewhere)…