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

IT Governance and Shareholder Value

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.