EPN Office @ De Meeûssquare 23, 1000 Brussel, België
The IT Platform within EPN organised, in parallel with its professional development services, a roundtable discussion specifically designed for the professionals in the IT sector. The objective of this event was to give participants the essential knowledge for implementing and conducting the governance of IT enterprises. The event explored the most commonly used frameworks and guidelines and delivered knowledge in domains such as Enterprise Architecture and Business Transformation, IT Governance principles and practices. The main target groups for this discussion were basically CIOs, IT directors and business managers within large and medium-sized organisations, senior and executive consultants and IT professionals.
IT Governance is a subset discipline of Corporate Governance focused on information technology (IT) systems and their performance and risk management. IT Governance is defined by ISACA as “the responsibility of executives and the board of directors, and consists of the leadership, organisational structures and processes that ensure that the enterprise’s IT sustains and extends the organisation’s strategies and objectives”.
Prof. Ataya explained how significant it is for an existing organisation to implement a coherent and adequate governance concerning the information technologies. Although IT governance has to come from the top management of the organisation, Prof. Ataya underlined the fact that awareness has to be raised throughout the organisation. He said that the IT budget is typically thrown on tactical initiative and decided by the commercial or business departments in numerous organisations. The arguments promoting the IT governance are the following: value, alignment, security, keeping IT running, managing continuity, and regulatory compliance.
COBIT framework 4.1 and 5.0 have also been discussed and Mr. Ataya presented what has changed in COBIT 5.0.
The Enterprise Architecture (EA) designs how the IT governance in an organisation would be implemented. The Enterprise Architecture is the “description of the fundamental underlying design of the components of the business system, or of one element of the business system (e.g., technology), the relationships among them, and the manner in which they support the organisation’s objectives”. The professor demonstrated independent, non-redundant artifacts and explained how these artifacts interrelate with each other while developing a set of prioritised, aligned initiatives and road maps to understand the organization and to communicate this understanding to stakeholders. He presented some real world examples about how Enterprise Architecture illuminates in which ways an organisation with all of its members can achieve its objectives through the creation of a series of engineered models and project initiatives, that can easily be understood by all of the people associated with the organisation.
[URIS id=410]