The emerging demand for business project audits

Raymond Young — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:37:18 +0000

Boards appear to be genuinely interested in improving their performance [i]. They are also looking for guidance on IT issues but (a) their experience with IT advisers had been disappointing [ii] and (b) ‘best-practice’ had been found to be of little practical utility with no consistent impact on success [iii].

However new governance Standards (ISO38500, AS8016, HB280) are emerging that address board-level concerns and are focused on the realisation of above average returns. Within Australia, because of the large investments in IT, effective governance of projects could lead to 1-3% increases in GDP. It will be a major breakthrough if boards start to follow these guidelines and require business process audits as part of the regular governance process.

The leading indicators of change might be:

appointment of board members with IT experience,
business project auditing being offered by major consultancies,
widespread adoption of the new governance Standards,
the term ‘business projects’ entering into the common business language
significant negative press over new project failures.

These suggestions were originally presented at an ISACA professional development session in Sydney on 14 March 2007. The slides can be seen by clicking on the link below.

[i] R. Leblanc and J. Gillies, Inside the Boardroom: the coming revolution in corporate governance (Toronto: John Wiley and Sons, 2005)

[ii] R.C. Young and E. Jordan, “Lifting the Game: Board views on e-commerce risk,” in IFIP TG8.6 the adoption and diffusion of IT in an environment of critical change, (Sydney: Pearson Publishing Service, 2002), pp. 102-113

[iii] Raymond Young and Ernest Jordan, “Top management support: Mantra or necessity?,” International Journal of Project Management, 26 (2008), 713 – 725

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The emerging demand for business project audits