If you look back at the last couple of decades, you’ll notice a handful of phenomena that are so ‘new’, that people find it challenging to describe them without resorting to using bizarre nouns.
One example is unicorn — formerly used to describe a mythical creature, now reassigned to describe one-hit wonder companies that grew from ‘the garage’ to the digital giants we know today. How do these unicorns come to be? Why were they able to grow so fast and transform a lot of people’s lives that half-century-old corporate giants weren’t able to do so quickly?
The secret ingredient is competent IT governance.
Why IT Governance is often overlooked
Information Technology (IT) governance is a formal discipline of aligning IT strategy with business strategy. It is to allow information technology to enter the board room, and to be taken seriously — not simply as a way to introduce a fancy new gadget or software for one department. Rather, IT governance offers a change within the entire organization by allowing IT to govern decision-making processes along with traditional management methods.
For companies born in a time when manual labor and manual thinking would run a successful company, board of directors would often delay or even dismiss the idea of a complete digital transformation of the face of the organization as well as its inner workings. Change can indeed be frightening, and outside of the scope of management, people may not fully understand the consequence of a digital transformation.
IT Governance is the way of the future
ISACA illustrates quite well the difference between simple IT application and IT governance. Machine learning technology can help banks’ anti-money laundering business units to cut down time and labor that goes to waste whenever a suspicious transaction is a false-positive. This is only one application of IT in one business unit.
IT governance on the other hand elevates the importance of IT-related decision-making, such as digitizing the customer experience by creating mobile applications, or connecting accounts with third-party digital wallets to provide convenient in-app transfers, or to work with smartphone hardware to make cashless, cardless, and effortless transactions.
Creating frameworks for effective IT governance will take a lot of time and effort. However, trust and communication has always been the key to creating a frictionless transformation, no matter how large a company is. If old industry giants were to survive, they must adapt to a changing market landscape and cater to people with entirely new lifestyles and purchase patterns.
Do not work alone in this new era
Xynexis International is at the forefront of cyber security and has witnessed the incredible digital transformations of many companies, from private banks and financial services, to the government and public services. The new IT governance will demand the company to meet many criteria, such as compliance and certifications, IT security risk assessments, application security, incident response and digital forensics, PCI DSS QSA in order to work with payment cards, and many more.
We encourage you to start learning about our services.
