Information Technology & Communication

Information Technology Governance, IT Governance or ICT (Information & Communications Technology) Governance, is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives, for instance Sarbanes-Oxley in the USA and Basel II in Europe, as well as the acknowledgment that IT projects can easily get out of control and profoundly affect the performance of an organization.

A characteristic theme of IT governance discussions is that the IT capability can no longer be a black box. The traditional involvement of board-level executives in IT issues was to defer all key decisions to the company’s IT professionals. IT governance implies a system in which all stakeholders, including the board, internal customers, and in particular departments such as finance, have the necessary input into the decision making process. This prevents IT from independently making and later being held solely responsible for poor decisions. It also prevents critical users from later finding that the system does not behave or perform as expected, as explained in the Harvard Business Review article by R. Nolan:

A board needs to understand the overall architecture of its company’s IT applications portfolio … The board must ensure that management knows what information resources are out there, what condition they are in, and what role they play in generating revenue… ^[1]

Inline references

1. ^ Nolan, R. and F. W. McFarlan (2005). “Information Technology and the Board of Directors.” Harvard Business Review (October 2005).

Other references

• Lutchen, M. (2004). Managing IT as a business : a survival guide for CEOs. Hoboken, N.J., J. Wiley., ISBN 0-471-47104-6
• March J., Simon H., Organizations, Blackwell Publishers, 1993 (First ed. Wiley, 1958), ISBN 0-631-18631-X
• Van Grembergen W., Strategies for Information technology Governance, IDEA Group Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1-59140-284-0
• Georgel F., IT Gouvernance : Maitrise d’un systeme d’information, Dunod, 2004(Ed1) 2006(Ed2), ISBN 2-10-050241-7
• Renz, Patrick S. (2007). “Project Governance.” Heidelberg, Physica-Verl. (Contributions to Economics) ISBN 978-3-7908-1926-7

Links

Institutes and associations

• The IT Governance Institute
• Informations Systems Audit and Control Association
• International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Inc. – IAITAM
• Australian Computer Society Governance of ICT Committee
• IT Governance Network

Background

• Overview of IT Governance publications

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Information technology (IT), as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), is “the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware.”^[1] IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, protect, process, transmit, and securely retrieve information.

Today, the term information technology has ballooned to encompass many aspects of computing and technology, and the term has become very recognizable. The information technology umbrella can be quite large, covering many fields. IT professionals perform a variety of duties that range from installing applications to designing complex computer networks and information databases. A few of the duties that IT professionals perform may include data management, networking, engineering computer hardware, database and software design, as well as the management and administration of entire systems.

When computer and communications technologies are combined, the result is information technology, or “infotech”. Information technology is a general term that describes any technology that helps to produce, manipulate, store, communicate, and/or disseminate information. Presumably, when speaking of Information Technology (IT) as a whole, it is noted that the use of computers and information are associated.

The term information technology is sometimes said to have been coined by Jim Domsic of Michigan in November 1981. Domsic, who worked as a computer manager for an automotive related industry, is supposed to have created the term to modernize the outdated phrase “data processing”. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, in defining information technology as “the branch of technology concerned with the dissemination, processing, and storage of information, esp. by means of computers” provides an illustrative quote from the year 1958 (Leavitt & Whisler in Harvard Business Rev. XXXVI. 41/1 “The new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology.”) that predates the so-far unsubstantiated Domsic coinage.

In recent years ABET and the ACM have collaborated to form accreditation and curriculum standards for degrees in Information Technology as a distinct field of study separate from both Computer Science and Information Systems. SIGITE is the ACM working group for defining these standards.

References

Further reading

• The Global Information Technology Report 2008–2009. World Economic Forum and INSEAD. 2009. pp. 406. ISBN 978-92-95044-19-7.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Need an webmaster? Click HERE

Video: Global Information Technology Report 2009 – Irene Mia