governance

Disaster Recovery Planning Made Simple

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Disaster recovery and contingency planning have been highlighted in the past week as the biggest issue since sliced bread started getting mouldy, as Hurricane Katrina hit NOLA hard and fast. In its wake was left the startling realisation that even the richest country in the world can have infrastructure devastated and destroyed by the forces of nature. The cost of the disaster is $US100 billion and climbing, with a significant part of that the IT Infrastructure.

And the week prior to that was the Zotob worm, which shut down Holden’s processing plants for a day (estimated costs: $A6,000,000 and yes, I checked the zeros).

In the IT context, both these events show that there is an increasing reliance upon information technology, and clearly business continuity plans are going to be top of the charts again for a while for our clients. This also comes back to IS Strategy and Governance procedures for clients. The facts bear out the old adage that luck is the residue of good planning – good IS Strategies and Business Continuity planning will help business A survive and business B not.

Probably a future cause celebre fot IT Disaster Planning – although some would perhaps suggest that it has worked too well – has been www.directnic.com, which is an ISP operating in a New Orleans downtown skyscraper that has maintained its connection to the internet throughout the disaster. Its biggest problem now is that it is getting many hits from around the world because people are blogging about it (just as I am now) which is causing some stress on their connectivity.

They have also maintained a blog about the disaster throughout, as reported by The Register and located at /mgno.com.

Interestingly, at least partly because of this blog, the ongoing debate about the issues related to blogs and their journalistic integrity has now tended to swung in favour of the humble blogger who, as johnny-on-the-spot in a time like this, tends to report what they see rather than filter it through the eyes of a journalist – which is both its strength and its weakness, clearly.

Disparity between corporate and IT governance implementation: survey

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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.

Bone ITIL Moments

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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

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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

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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