PricewaterhouweCoopers has recently conducted the 2006 IT Governance Survey on behalf of the IT Governance Institute (ITGI). The survey is the most comprehensive in its kind: on a worldwide basis, over 700 organisations covering different industries have been surveyed on a wide range of IT Governance related topics.
The main conclusions of the survey are:
- IT is more critical to business than ever. For 87 percent of the participants, IT is quite to very important to the delivery of the corporate strategy and vision. For 63 percent of the respondents, IT is regularly or always on the board’s agenda.
- General managers feel more positive toward IT than IT managers do. Compared to IT managers, general managers attach even more criticality and importance to IT. In addition, they are generally more satisfied with IT and with its strategic alignment with the business.
- Significant differences amongst industry sectors exist. - IT/telecom and financial services appear to be better performers when it comes to IT governance, while the retail and manufacturing industries are lesser performers. These outcomes are in line with the degree of strategic importance of IT in these industry sectors.
- When talking about IT Related problems, staffing is the most important IT-related problem. Taking into account all aspects of a problem, such as frequency of occurrence, severity of the problem and future evolution, IT staffing appears to be the most important problem in IT. On the other hand, Information security is not the most important IT-related problem, and it is, together with Compliance issues, ranked last of eight IT problem categories.
- IT outsourcing is no longer seen as the most effective measure to resolve IT problems. As business and IT have become increasingly aware of the fact that IT problems cannot be outsourced, they have tended to bring control of problematic systems back in-house.
- Awareness of ISACA and ITGI, and of CobiT, has increased. Awareness amongst the general IT population of the ISACA and ITGI brands has almost tripled compared to the 2003 survey. Awareness in the general population of the existence of COBIT has increased by 50 percent since 2003, from 18 percent to 27 percent.
- IT governance (and COBIT) is not as easily implemented as originally estimated. A number of results lead to the conclusion that implementing IT governance is not as straightforward as perhaps once thought. The same conclusion can be made regarding COBIT implementation. Putting things in perspective, however, these results confirm that:
- Good IT governance practices are not built overnight; they require time and continued commitment.
- Implementing COBIT is not a matter of taking it out of the box and implementing it as written. Instead, it is a process of selecting the most appropriate elements, tailoring them as needed and applying them to the specific needs of the organisation.
- COBIT is being used by about 10 percent of the IT population. The current acceptance rate of COBIT—i.e., the percentage of the general IT population using one or more parts of COBIT—is now 10 percent (at least). Given the relatively large number of respondents indicating that they use an internally developed IT governance solution, it is probable that there are a number of ‘hidden’ COBIT users who have implemented portions of it in their own enterprise-specific solution.
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