Corporate governance is now an entrenched aspect of the South African business landscape. The principles that devolve from the King II report and the Basel II Accord apply across all aspects of risk in business. Information technology (IT) is no exception.
Corporate governance is viewed by many businesses as a necessary evil, but early adopters can find real business benefit in embracing the opportunity presented by the concept.
Businesses with high levels of corporate governance tend to trade at PE (price/earnings) ratios higher than those of less compliant rivals as investors perceive well-governed businesses to be less risky and are thus prepared to pay a premium.
The issue of corporate governance is particularly relevant in the event of a merger or acquisition as a compliant business is less likely to harbour hidden surprises and will favourably influence the potential price tag that can be applied to that organisation.
Asset inventories
Companies are now expected to develop and maintain real-time hardware and software asset inventories in order to understand, and be able to report on, what assets they own and the uses to which they are being put.
As organisations are now responsible for what employees use their systems for - and that the ultimate liability therefore vests in the company`s director in their personal capacity - it is very much in every organisation`s interest to be able to enforce an 'acceptable usage` policy across all its IT systems.
Failure to do so constitutes negligence and opens the organisation and its directors to liability from all stakeholders, including shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers and competitors.
In addition, recent action taken by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), driven by aggressive software vendors such as Microsoft, leave companies with no option other than to take great care with respect to contingent licensing liability arising from software deployed on their systems.
Asset management software applications will enable the organisation to address corporate governance issues as they apply to IT by allowing the development and maintenance of real-time hardware and software asset registers, the understanding of what assets are where in the organisation, as well as who is using them and what they are being used for.
In addition, the technology enables the organisation to define and enforce policies down to individual user level, while building and maintaining a historical record of changes to the status of an asset for audit and forensic purposes.
Capacity planning
Optimal allocation of expensive IT resources throughout the enterprise will clearly deliver above and below the line benefits to the organisation. The larger and more complex the environment, however, the more difficult this objective is to achieve in practice.
All users want faster machines and the latest software and it is very often a highly labour-intensive process for IT, having received a request for an upgrade, to ascertain whether the request has business merit or not.
Typically the help-desk technician will have to refer the request to his or her manager, who will in turn refer the request to the user`s manager and eventually a decision will get taken and acted upon. The decision will often be of a subjective nature as many of the critical facts upon which such a decision should be based will be unavailable to the decision-makers at the time.
It is important that the decision-maker be in possession of all the facts as they pertain to the current status of the machine. This includes the role of the user within the organisation, the company policy with respect to the relevant class of user as well as the actual historical usage and performance statistics of the user`s machine with respect both hardware and software.
This will help define the difference between a genuine business-related request for and upgrade and an unnecessary expenditure of company money.
This benefit applies equally to one-off requests as well as enterprise-wide hardware and software technology refresh projects. Organisations that have the above-mentioned information at hand will make consistently better capacity planning decisions than organisations that do not, and end up realising considerable savings.
The deployment of enterprise asset management software provides decision makers with real time, easy to access to information that will allow consistently high-quality decisions to be taken. As a result, users will be provided with the appropriate level of resources to perform the tasks assigned to them.
Management and control
Management and control of large and diverse IT infrastructures places an enormous load on expensive and scare IT resources. Gartner estimates that the typical medium to large organisation spends between 60% and 70% of its IT resources on maintaining its existing infrastructure with only the balance free to further develop IT`s ability to support and drive the business forward.
The application, in an environment of technologies, that is able to automate much of the management and control function will free up resources that can then be redeployed in more productive areas and relieve much of the pressure that IT managers face daily to "do more with less".
The net result is that IT is better able to support the organisation`s business, and this fact can only positively influence bottom line performance and ultimately on the value of the enterprise as a whole.
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