Plenary Lecture
Exploratory Study on the IT Governance Usage in Leading Croatian Companies
Professor Mario Spremić
Faculty of Economics and Business Zagreb
University of Zagreb
CROATIA
E-mail: mspremic@efzg.hr
Abstract: Despite the financial crisis and ongoing need for cost cutting, companies all around the world heavily invest in information systems (IS) and underlying information technology (IT). Information systems (IS) plays very important role in modern business organizations supporting its organizational efficiency or, under certain circumstances, fostering business model innovation and change. IS can influence organization competiveness in two ways: supporting operational efficiency (IS as a main infrastructure for the current business), or differentiating business through business model innovation and business process change. In either way IS becomes very important to the business and needs to be aligned with strategic objectives in order to justify massive investments. A number of studies (Weill and Ross (2004), Groznik et. al (2003), Spremić (2002)) showed that investments in IS and underlying IT resulted in added business value if they are truly connected with strategic business objectives. In that sense proliferation of governance of enterprise IT helps companies manage, or rather, govern IS as a primary business function with executive management involved in making decision about IS and IT. The quality of IT governance is rising with the large number of decisions about IS made by executive management, not IT departments. The more executive management is engaged in making decision about IS and IT, the IT governance is of better quality. In this paper the practice of governing the enterprise IT will investigated on a sample of the largest 100 Croatian companies. Research questions posed here will reveal if there are some formal IT governance mechanisms, are there any differences in perceived role of IS and IT between CIOs (Chief Information Officers) and CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) of the sampled companies and what are the mechanisms to govern massive investment in enterprise IT.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Mario Spremic is Full Professor and a head of the Department of Informatics at the Faculty of Economics & Business, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He received a B.Sc. in Mathematical Sciences, M.Sc. in IT Management and Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Zagreb. Previously he had been working as system analyst, project manager and CIO deputy (Agrokor d.d., Ledo d.d.) and from year 2000. he is permanently employed at Faculty of Economics and Business. He had published 10 books and more than 150 papers in scientific journals, books and conference proceedings mainly in area of e-business, IT governance, IT risk management, IS strategy, IS security, IS control and audit and IT Value. He is also a visiting professor at various postgraduate studies (University of Zagreb, University of Sarajevo, University of Ljubljana) with courses IT Governance, e-Business, Information Systems Strategy and Information System Control and Audit.
Mario is an associate editor and a member of Boards and Committees for a number of journals (Editorial Review Board Member of the International Journal on IT/Business Alignment and Governance - IJITBAG, International Journal of E-Business Research - IJEBR, Journal of Information, Information Technology, and Organizations - JIITO, MASAUM Journal of Computing –MJC, International Journal of Computer, Information, System Sciences and Engineering – IJCISSE) and program committee member and/or reviewer for various international conferences (ICETE, IADIS, WSEAS, ICE-B, SECRYPT, IARIA, Bled e-Commerce Conference, MCIS, IBIMA, etc., full list at www.efzg.hr/mspremic).
Mario is an ISACA member (Information System Audit and Control Association), ISACA Academic Advocate, vice-president of ISACA CC (Croatian Chapter), IIA (Institute of Internal Auditors) member and member of the Centre for Business Information, Organisation and Process Management at Westminster Business School, University of Westminster, UK. Mario holds prestigious ISACA’s CGEIT international certificate (Certificate in Governance of Enterprise IT - www.isaca.org/certification).
Mario has also been acting as a consultant in international projects for a number of Croatian and Slovenian companies (Src.si, Nova Kreditna Banka Maribor) and in Bosnia and Herzegovina (co-director of master study program at Faculty of Economics Sarajevo and consultant for Federal Banking Agency in implementing regulatory framework for IT Governance, IS Auditing and Security and IT Outsourcing) for preferably in areas of IS strategy, IT governance and risk compliance, business process change and IS control and IS audit with the experience in implementing various IT projects and conducting wide range of information system audit projects. As a qualified information system auditor and consultant he has been participating in a number of regulatory-based IS audits and advisory projects and besides scientific, gain in-depth expert knowledge of commonly used standards such as CobiT, ISO 27001, Risk IT, Val IT, Basel II, SoX, ITIL, etc (full reference listing is beneath).