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Don't play with technology, use it

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 12 Nov 2012
Organisations should have the power to harness a perfect technology storm, says Dac Systems' Chris Willemse.
Organisations should have the power to harness a perfect technology storm, says Dac Systems' Chris Willemse.

Organisations must not play with technology, but must use it to their own advantage.

So said Chris Willemse, MD of Dac Systems, in a presentation on the impact of emerging technologies on business, in Johannesburg last week.

Describing emerging technologies as a storm, Willemse said: "Organisations should have the power to harness a perfect storm. This will allow them to do whatever they need to do, whenever they need to do it, with whatever computing devices they have with them, regardless of where they are."

However, he pointed out that this has to be done in line with the company's policies.

According to Willemse, with the abundance of technologies, companies have many choices, but when making software system choices, they need to consider applications portfolios, business processes, individual behaviour towards mobility and social platforms, the right infrastructure and platforms for growth, data management and exploration, as well as economic pressures on companies.

"At Dac Systems, we suggest that companies focus on three key areas of the business to achieve their objectives: productivity - the ability to work efficiently; governance - the ability to control effectively, and enterprise scaling - the ability to scale seamlessly," Willemse added.

Also speaking at the event, Akesh Lalla, business productivity sales manager at Microsoft SA, said organisations today are operating in increasingly demanding environments.

"In this day of IT consumerisation, 95% of information workers report that they use at least one self-purchased device at work. Infrastructure cost and complexity is another issue, with 70% of IT budgets spent on maintaining inflexible and siloed data centre infrastructure."

According to Lalla, the global mobile worker population will grow to more than one third of the world's workforce by 2013, which is approximately 1.2 billion.

Gary Regan, technical director at Dac Systems, who also spoke at the event, stressed that, faced with all these new developments, organisations should ensure they are compliant with governance issues.

"Governance relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance," he explained.

"It consists of either a separate process or is part of management or leadership processes. These processes and systems are typically administered by a governing body. When discussing governance in particular institutions, the quality of governance within the institutions is often compared to a standard of good governance."

Moving to corporate governance, Regan noted it is the system by which companies are directed and controlled.

"It involves regulatory and market mechanisms, and the roles and relationships between a company's management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders, and the goals for which the corporation is governed.

"In contemporary business corporations, the main external stakeholder groups are shareholders, debtholders, trade creditors, suppliers, customers and communities affected by the corporation's activities. Internal stakeholders are the board of directors, executives and other employees."

According to Regan, IT governance is a subset discipline of corporate governance focused on IT systems and their performance and risk management.

"The rising interest in IT governance is partly due to compliance initiatives, for instance Sarbanes-Oxley in the US and Basel II in Europe, but more so because of the need for greater accountability for decision-making around the use of IT in the best interest of all stakeholders."

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