[Year 12 SofDev] ICT Standards Australia now ISO

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Aussie ICT guidelines embraced as world standard

Brett Winterford, ZDNet.com.au 12 June 2008 03:52PM  Tags: business, it,
standards australia, ict, international standard, governance, guidelines

Guidelines on the corporate governance of ICT developed by Standards 
Australia have been adopted as an international standard by the ISO 
(International Standards Organisation). 

 The ISO38500 standard, which gives business leaders a broad set of high 
level guidelines on how to make better decisions with regards to ICT, was 
released internationally earlier this week after several years of hard 
work by its predominantly Australian authors. 

The standard is in fact an international adaptation of AS8015, developed 
within the auspices of Standards Australia and released in January 2005 in 
an effort to reduce the amount of ICT projects that wind up on the 
scrapheap. 

Contributors to AS8015 included representatives from the Australian 
Computer Society, the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the 
Australian Bankers Association. 

Mark Toomey, an Australian corporate governance expert and project editor 
for ISO38500, said that a good 90 per cent of the international standard 
has its foundations in AS8015. 

"The ISO standard is absolutely faithful to AS8015," he said. 

ISO38500 achieved 100 per cent consensus among standard bodies the world 
over after its technical committee spent five months resolving any 
criticisms noted during the vote. 

Toomey said the interest from the international community, especially in 
Europe, has "delightfully astounded" him ..

"The value of the standard for directors is that it gives them a way at 
looking at the behaviour of the organisation when making decisions," he 
explained. 

"It gives them a way of validating that an organisation was behaving the 
right way, which is what a company director is eminently qualified to do."

"It's about the core behaviour that lies behind decision-making." 

Toomey has high hopes that more Australian organisations will take the 
standard seriously now that it is embraced internationally. 

"There are enormous economic benefits in reducing the rate of failure of
IT projects, and enormous value in getting more out of the IT we've got." 

The ISO38500 standard is available here. 

http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?
csnumber=51639

This article here.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Aussie-ICT-guidelines-embraced-
as-world-standard/0,139023166,339289809,00.htm?ocid=nl_TNB_13062008_fea_l9

--
Cheers Toomey
Stephen Loosley
Victoria Australia




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