Summit aims to define efficient and improved IT governance

Enterprises are looking to adopt efficient and improved IT governance within their organisations in an attempt to take better control of business processes and cost saving efforts. Drivers for good IT governance include strong management for efficient organisation striving to operate the way clients would expect, and legislation and regulations imposed on the organisation for better control among industry competition.

Drivers effecting IT

In South Africa, the King Code of Governance Principles, more commonly known as King 3, and the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) Bill are two of the most recent common drivers with a direct effect on IT. Companies are required to meet numerous industry specific regulations to become strictly compliant, more specifically within the financial services industry.

For successful IT governance, the enterprise needs to gain control in aligning the IT strategy with the business strategy, ensuring business objectives are in line with IT objectives and ensuring mechanisms exist to maintain the successful alignment on a real-time basis. The enterprise needs to ensure accountability for performance and risk management of IT and the continual focus on the elements of IT operations.

Maintaining focus on the value of delivery by IT will ensure the enterprise day-to-day operations and during system acquisition, development, or enhancement projects run smoothly without interruption. IT governance demands careful attention in applying standardised and practical IT policies and procedures for the organisation, streamlining and optimising communication within IT to maintain control over and derive enhanced value from your IT.

Risks are addressed

IT governance is fast becoming an essential part of corporate governance, focusing on improving and streamlining business policies and procedures, roles and responsibilities and decision making mechanisms to ensure that information technologies deliver measurable value to the enterprise. Streamlining these processes will ensure risks attributable to various dependencies on IT are known and appropriately addressed within an enterprise risk management framework.

The IT Leaders Africa Summit is set to address topical industry issues and challenges currently facing the enterprise, before and after adopting cloud and virtualisation environments. The summit will highlight recent developments in the ICT industry within South Africa and abroad, addressing all possible solutions through innovation and creation.

The summit aims to address topical industry issues and challenges as the enterprise moves forward in adopting cloud strategies to better improve overall operational standing within the industry. The IT Leaders Africa Summit will be held in Johannesburg from 13 to 14 March 2013. The summit is hosted and produced by international business-to-business conferencing company, Kinetic Events.