Thoughts from the Vice President of ISACA & ITGI
Thoughts from the Vice President’s chair
I expect this to be the first of a series of quarterly articles which will reflect on my own views and insights to ISACA / ITGI, the IT assurance; security and governance profession, and the use of IT in general.
I thought I‘d kick off this piece with a few thoughts on the large steps ISACA and the ITGI have made over recent years. It’s only a few years ago that the Association had less than 25,000 members, was struggling to get people to look at CobiT and was basically known as the administrators of the Certified Information System Auditor certification.
Back then, if you told people you were a member of ISACA they gave you a blank look. If you mentioned CISA did may have generated a glimmer of recognition, perhaps. Certainly, if you were speaking to people outside the IS audit world you really didn’t have too much to say that people wanted to hear.
However, I’m happy to say that we’re finally seeing the profile of the Association rise and its intellectual property gaining the recognition it deserves. I must admit to a feeling of satisfaction when I see that the Gartner Group believe that by 2010 CobiT, together with ITIL and Six Sigma will be accepted as a suite of defacto standards for IT Governance, IT service delivery, and quality management. Even though I’ve played little part in the development of CobiT, I’ve always understood its value and I’m please to see that others are now coming to the same conclusion.
Along with the range of material made available free of charge by the ITGI; CobiT CISA, CISM, and the potential new certification for governance professionals, now provide leading edge guidance and support to, not only the IT governance, security and assurance profession, but the wider business community.
Where to from here? On a personal level, I believe there is much that needs to be done on the people issues relating to information technology and its use. Because this is so bound up in “human culture” it will provide an incredible challenge. But, the development of a control framework for the management of information related technologies seemed like an incredible challenge back in the early 1990’s.
Howard Nicholson
Vice President ISACA & ITGI
