governance

ISACA Executive Briefing on IT Governance

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Today I am attending the John Thorp Executive Lunch on IT Governance (specifically, he is discussing value governance, investment management and portfolio management).  This is happening at the Convention Centre, and then afterwards I am attending a round table discussion for the IT Governance Institute on the topic of IT Governance and where it needs to go to.

The discussion is complementary to my current role lecturing in IT Governance at QUT and the PhD I am doing in IT Audit (which relates directly to COBIT, and whether organisations need to have different approaches to IT Audit).  My personal view is that not enough organisations are working with COBIT enough, and are treating their IT systems as black boxes.  I don’t believe that that’s appropriate for large, IT-dependent businesses.  And I think that is becoming an increasingly validated point of view. 

I get a guernsey to the roundtable discussion as a ‘leading local professional’ in the area of IT Governance.  Modesty prevents me from affirming that description, but I will fight for their right to say it. 

It promises to be interesting; I’ll post my thoughts on how it travelled after it’s happened. 

Dow Jones vs Gutnick – and the law’s an ass

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Blogging from the back of the taxi, I’m just reminded to blog about the intriguing case I alerted to last night. I am lecturing at QUT for about seven weeks starting in about September on IT Governance. The first half is being presented by Bill Singleton, a senior associate with Allens Arthur Robertson, and he is basically presenting the law to them as it relates to ensuring the good governance of IT.

I attended last night to be introduced to the class, and I stayed for the lecture. One of the interesting cases was to me the Dow Jones v Gutnick case. From what I understood, Dow Jones implied in their newsletter that Gutnick was involved in insider trading. This did not sit well with Mr Gutnick who, even though the newsletter was written in New York and uploaded to the net to a server in New York, sued them in Victoria for defamation.

My first reaction was that the suit would fail for lack of jurisdiction – Victoria is not New York after all.

Apparently Gutnick won on the basis that the defamation occurs where the download took place – Victoria. And the kicker is that, because of the bilateral agreements with the US, Gutnick then had an enforceable court order that he could pursue in the States.

When I mentioned this to my lawyer wife (I’m certainly no lawyer) her reaction was ‘So? That makes sense, otherwise you’d forum shop.’

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My view is that it’s rather bad – you write something, put it on the net, and any jurisdiction where there is a bilateral agreement – or where you want to do business – could result in an enforceable court order.

I mean, what if you innocently break the law in another jurisdiction? China, for example? Admittedly this was a defamation case, but even so it scares and annoys me a little.

I suspect there may be implications for corporate bloggers there.

I may misunderstand, after all I was in a lecture late at night. However to me it seems a classic case of, once again, the law getting in the way of progress.

Introducing a guide for delivering ICT Services in SME’s

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Some time ago as part of my commitments to the CPA Australia IT & Management Centre of Excellence, I was the primary author for a new guide called ‘Delivering information and communications technology services to small to medium enterprises’.  This guide joins the CoE’s other major publications on IT Governance and Business Management of IT in helping businesses manage today’s IT. 

Although I’m listed as the primary author, the new publication draws upon the combined experience of the CoE in making sure ICT does those things that the business needs doing.  Case studies are used to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of using in-house, managed service provider, or completely outsourced approaches.  A practical approach to managing ICT in an SME so that the business can get what it needs from ICT is provided. 

This new guide is now available for free download on the IT Business Management section of the CPA Australia website. 

Please click the picture below if you’d like to download the complete publication. 

For reference, the other publications that are available are the ‘Business Management of IT’ guide and the ‘IT Governance’ guide:

 

The last two publications are available from the CPA Store.

Feedback from data governance seminar

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Hmmm.  One of my ‘corporate values’ is honesty.  Which translates to transparency.  So… I thought I’d post the feedback that I received for the data governance seminar a week or two ago (30th April 2008).  Out of 7, the feedback was 5.7, and I received comments like:

  • Good, relevant and practical
  • Very helpful
  • A good presentation. Will be checking up on notes
  • Annoying that an accountant knows so much about IT!!!
  • Good governance advice
  • Good, reusable data
  • Practical at times. I didn’t agree with some comments
  • Clear presentation; needs to use gender neutral language
  • Practical and concrete
  • Very data focussed and comprehensive

My favourite I think is that it’s annoying for an accountant to know so much about IT :).  And I’ll watch the gender-neutral language in future, old mysogynistic habits die hard.

Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks

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As promised in my last post, I attach to this blog post my speaker’s notes for today’s session ‘Advancing data governance to create improved data quality frameworks’.  This presentation was given at Ark Group Australasia’s Data Quality Conference, held on 30th April 2008 at Crystal Palaces, Luna Park in Sydney.  I undertook the presentation as a Director of Applied Insight Pty Ltd, my business systems consulting company. 

The brochure for this conference can be found here.

My speaker’s notes are available below:

For completeness, here are my slides as provided to conference participants (in PDF form):

As always, feedback from members of the audience, via comments or an email, is very welcome.  I hope it was an interesting approach at some level. 

I did at one stage think of going all Gordon Ramsey (he of ‘Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares’) on the audience – I’m a brand new fan, it’s just like consulting but with more swearing and nan bread! – but decided against it.  Perhaps next time, that’s what I’ll do – I’ll try good-consultant, bad-consultant.  Probably at least as good as my idea of having a 40-minute presentation with a single slide with four circles on it.  Maybe one day I’ll be able to combine the two approaches. 

By the way, I loved the venue – at least it will stand out in my memory, that’s for sure.  Here’s a photo I took outside:

I am fairly certain it is the only data quality conference ever held in a theme park.