Lack of IT staff widely felt in NZ and Australia

The problem is widespread through the Asia-Pacific region, with 45 percent of organisations reporting “not enough IT staff” as the most pressing challenge over the past year.

Other high-ranking difficulties uncovered in ISACA’s Governance of Enterprise IT (GEIT) survey include project overrun (in 41 percent of organisations) and “high cost of IT with a low or unknown return on investment” (38 percent).

While the benefit of IT, particularly for improved customer service is widely acknowledged, commitment of funds to further IT development is cautious; asked “what is your organisation planning to do regarding IT investments?" the most common response, from 49 percent of Asia-Pacific users, is to “increase selectively based on potential/expected contribution to business value.”

A large proportion of respondents report problems for the organisation arising from an IT incident in the past year. Reduction in customer satisfaction (43 percent) and delayed or missed “opportunities to reduce cost” (44 percent) are the most commonly reported outcomes of such an incident across the Asia-Pacific region.

While most (57 percent) of organisations say they have a framework or standard for IT governance, most also report business management has a low (20 percent) or moderate (51 percent) level of involvement in IT governance.

Only 20 percent of Asia-Pacific organisations report having cancelled or ended an IT project before it was fully developed – though a further 22 percent reply “don’t know” to this question. Among those organisations who can remember having terminated an IT project, the highest proportion (36 percent) say it was owing to a change in business needs, rather than non-delivery on promises (27 percent) or budget overrun (9 percent).

For the year ahead, the issue of most concern, chosen from a list of “hot-button” security issues, is data leakage (22 percent). “Incidents related to employees’ personal devices” also rate highly, at 15 percent. Fifteen percent of users say the whole list of issues are of concern – also included are cyber attacks and external hacking as well as employee mistakes and the deliberate actions of “disgruntled employees”. Cloud computing is flagged as a security challenge by 10 percent of Asia-Pacific respondents.

The full Asia-Pacific survey results can be read at: http://www.isaca.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/2012-GEIT-Survey-Results-ASIA-PACIFIC.pdf

ISACA was formerly the Information Systems Audit and Control Association.