CPA Australia has a story on its website of a survey by HP Australia of IT Governance being out of alignment for businesses. The research wasn’t carried out by CPA Australia (or even the ITM COE) – it was carried out by HP – but it is an indicator of the ITM COE’s effectiveness in bringing this to the business agenda (where CPA Australia is firmly ensconced).This story was also picked up by CEO Online.
IT Governance
Bone ITIL Moments
I note that the blog I referred to the other day (erp4it) has a link to an article discussing the application and history of ITIL in the United States (BTW, it stands for “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”).
I seem to be falling over ITIL a lot these days – in IT Governance work and other areas – so it’s probably useful to note the source of all things ITIL: www.itil.org/itil_e/index_e.html.
ERP4IT – Discussion on IT Governance
I today noticed the business blog of “alphasong”, discussing IT Governance and the academic community’s approach to it – it would seem that he/she is concerned that academic business research tends to be doing “hard IT” rather than looking purely at the business and IT crossover points.
Having done some IS research in a business school, it is an interesting point of view – however, I think the state of the research is still fairly new for IT Governance and I think academia has a great deal of work in the pipeline (we had at least two papers for the Australian Accounting Review issue that are specifically on IT Governance). One of the fun things, I believe, with academia is that the process to publication is measured in years, not months, and certainly not minutes like blogging is.
IT Governance
Don’t you hate it when you state “I will post every day to my blog” and then look up from your desk to discover it’s been three weeks?
Anyway, I have just flown back into sunny (well, actually quite dark) Brisbane – much to my annoyance, the plane was delayed by an hour. Apparently an oven was broken in the plane. I am somewhat concerned that an oven is so central to the operation of the plane but apparently the Qantas manual says “thou shalt swap planes” and who am I to argue with people who know about how to keep planes in the air?
There was an ITM COE meeting in Melbourne today, and I suspect that I am suffering from a case of “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. I find IT Governance to be exceptionally interesting, and that is a topic that is well on the radar for the ITM COE – however, I could be accused for stretching the topic somewhat at times, as I think almost all business IT problems can be related back to poor IT governance in the first place (and if you’re not careful sometime, I’ll set you down and tell you all about it).
At any rate, here is a link to the IS Auditors’ association standard on IT Governance: COBIT
Desktop Search Tools
One of the fascinating new tools that have come to the fore over the past several years is an array of tools to assist you to retrieve the work you have already done – the work that is currently sitting in what could loosely be termed your knowledge library (if you’re not well-organised).
These tools include things such as Google Desktop Search (which is just out of beta), the MSN Search Toolbar, Yahoo Desktop Search, X1, and the Copernic Desktop Search. I have done a lot of research since this tool was mentioned at the IT Management Day (I chaired the day in Brisbane, at least partly because I chair the COE – oh, and I happen to live in Brisbane, so that may have helped) by Rob Roe of KAZ Technologies, and from the reviews I have read on the internet and my own experience, I think Copernic is a winner.
X1 costs – and since I am an accountant (there is a time-delay lock on my wallet), and the other tools are free and of great quality, it was never going to get a look in.
The MSN Search toolbar – well, apparently it doesn’t play nice with Mozilla Firefox (my preferred browser). It’s also from Microsoft (I like a lot of Microsoft products – they often just work without ten years geek experience), but the tendency I have seen is to bloatware and security issues. I was unable to confirm this, however, because the real killer for this product is it needs Windows XP to run, and like 40% or so of the business world, I still run Windows 2000 on my laptop.
The Yahoo search bar remains way too close to the beta program for me, so I didn’t really look at it too much. From reviews I’ve read, it seems to be a bit of a resource hog when indexing (even when you’re working).
Normally, Google would have been my tool of choice (what can I say – I already have one new verb “to Google”, meaning to thrash about and find stuff), but although it had a nice and simple interface, and the results were available in a browser, the Google tool is pretty much brain-dead in indexing just my local hard drive. There is a plug-in (too close to the old word, “hack”, for me) to search network drives, but it’s primogeniture is a little hard to determine and it comes with now arranties. Besides, this tool is only just out of beta.
Feeling a bit frantic, I downloaded and installed the Copernic deskbar, and it works for me. Although it doesn’t work with Groupwise (our email system of choice), that’s probably not a problem since neither do any of the other tools . Copernic works with network drives out of the box, it has a nice taskbar search tool, and the background indexing is nice and unobtrusive. I don’t understand why these other tools work only on the local hard drive – beyond the few script kiddies out there and consultants that work alone, it isn’t good practice to have valuable documents sitting on C:.
Some problems I did have with Copernic were when I tried to run it with Groupwise (I have Outlooked installed, so it tried to index Groupwise with somewhat disastrous results – the indexing essentially kept freezing my computer). It isn’t rated for Groupwise, so that’s probably not a surprise.
Also, I found that when I had the preview pane on, a couple of spreadsheets (I think with macros in them perhaps) caused a lovely blue screen of death – so I turned that off. I do suspect that may be a Novell incompatibility.
Finally, because the taskbar takes up some acreage, I decided to turn that off. Which I did. When I went to turn it back on – no luck. I racked my brains about it for 20 minutes how to resolve it and then decided the simple approach was best – I uninstalled the thing and re-installed, and then allowed it to reindex it. It took about half an hour of my life – and I won’t try turning off the taskbar again. The reindexing was unobtrusive (and continues to be) and I have 12,775 documents indexed fairly quickly, I thought, while I zapped out for a coffee.
So in summary, I am using Copernic on my laptop, and I have been very impressed so far (speed is excellent!). A side benefit is that if you show results by date, you can quickly see those files you have been working on recently (presuming, of course, the documents you have indexed are your documents – this will depend on how you work with a team). A tool like this raises issues for IT Governance, desktop stability, and IT installation policies, but that’s a topic for a different post.