Draft Australian Standard for Corporate governance of projects involving information technology investments

The Draft Australian Standard for "Corporate governance of projects involving information technology investments"is now available free for comment. The standard references works such as Good governance principles, and software engineering standards. It makes a bit of an understatement saying "The historical record of IT project delivery success has been poor." Much of the cause of the failures of those pojects have been due to management issue and poor governance rather than technical problems. Perhaps this standard can help.

One problem is that the standard will have only limited distribution as it will not be open access. Standards Australia and the publishing company SAI Global (SAI) are having a dispute over the distribution rights for Australian Standards. It would be prudent for anyone wanting to take part in development of a standard to check that rights under a Creative Commons licence, or similar, are agreed before work commences. In this way the full text of the standard can be made available online for free, while the standards body can still commercially exploit the work. A good example of this is the ODF standard, which ISO sell for 342 Swiss Francs, (about $AU352), while the developers, OASIS, make available for free. This arrangement allows those who need the official document to purchase it and everyone else to use the free text.

The Standard was prepared by Standards Australia/Standards New Zealand Committee IT-030, IT Governance and Management.

The objective of this Standard is to promote a substantial improvement in success in achieving business outcomes from business projects that involve investment in new or changed IT capabilities. To achieve this the Standard proposes a framework of principles to owners and directors, to senior managers, and to project managers charged with responsibility for governance of information technology [IT] projects.

This Standard is intended to contribute to the improvement of the success rate for IT projects. Such projects are important to organizations because they are the means to deliver business change and thus to deliver value in terms of competitive advantage and business benefits within defined timeframes. The need for effective governance of projects is
important to the organization.

This Standard elaborates on the set of principles and framework in AS 8015—2005, Corporate governance of information and communication technology.

The historical record of IT project delivery success has been poor. There is a substantial body of both anecdotal and rigorously developed evidence that organizations investing in information and communication technology in support of their business activities face disproportionate and unacceptable risk that their projects will fail to achieve intended outcomes at an acceptable cost, in an appropriate timeframe.

Many assessments of IT investments that have not produced satisfactory outcomes demonstrate that the seeds of failure were present and evident at a very early stage (sometimes before the project was started and approved), and that inadequate oversight resulted in otherwise clear symptoms of trouble being overlooked.

The governance of projects involving IT investment is a component of Corporate governance of IT since projects are necessary at all levels for business to achieve strategic and operational objectives while also generating clear corporate risks in case of failure.

The Standard does not prescribe or define the management practices required for projects, since they are already well defined in other sources. It is a governance responsibility to ensure that these are in place within the organization. ...

CONTENTS

SECTION 1 SCOPE AND GENERAL
1.1 SCOPE ......... 4
1.2 APPLICATION ... 4
1.3 BENEFITS OF USING THIS STANDARD ... 5
1.4 REFERENCES ... 6
1.5 DEFINITIONS ... 6

SECTION 2 FRAMEWORK FOR GOOD CORPORATE GOVERNANCE OF PROJECTS INVOLVING IT INVESTMENTS
2.1 PRINCIPLES ... 9
2.2 RESPONSIBILITY ... 11
2.3 GOVERNANCE MODEL ... 11

SECTION 3 GUIDANCE FOR THE CORPORATE GOVERNANCE OF PROJECTS INVOLVING IT INVESTMENTS
3.1 GENERAL ... 14
3.2 MECHANISMS FOR IMPLEMENTING PRINCIPLES ... 14

APPENDICES
A PRINCIPLES OF GOOD CORPORATE GOVERNANCE OF IT ... 17
B APPLYING THE PRINCIPLES ... 18 ...

From: Corporate governance of projects involving information technology investments. DR08145.doc - 26/06/2008 9:54:36
PREFACE