Speech by the Hon. Jason
Azzopardi, Parliamentary Secretary for Small
Business and Land, at the Information Systems Audit
and Control Association’s (ISACA) Conference on
‘Trust and Value in Information Systems’ – St
Julian’s - 21st May 2010
Dear Conference
delegates,
I am honoured to be
among such a gathering of professionals from a broad
cross-section of Maltese enterprises, world-class
corporate brands operating from Malta, and public
sector professionals delivering services to
businesses and citizens. Your gathering comes at a
timely phase of Government’s strategic envisioning:
we are embarking on a major policy, Vision2015,
which sets out the route which we want our country
to take in the coming year.
At a glance I note in
the audience — younger faces, our upcoming
professionals, as well as senior board executives
who regularly assess business risk, identify
potential investment, and deliver, both locally and
over the Internet
I was pleased to receive
a draft of your conference agenda and to see that
you will be deliberating the issues underpinning
business and professional success against these
requirements. These are requirements that sometimes
come from within the business and the
forward-looking Board intent on projecting itself as
a credible Partner, one who will be around to trade
with for years to come. Such requirements frequently
come as commercial stimulus by discerning overseas
businesses in the form of conditions of trade, and
they may be legal requirements from the EU and
beyond.
You are today addressing
most topical issues: the need for business speed and
agility, how IT enables business, and sound IT
investment planning. Investment in the present phase
of the economic cycle will place the astute
entrepreneur a step ahead, well positioned to push
and gain early ground in large overseas markets as
these recover from the recent global recession. I
note with satisfaction that during this seminar you
will be discussing cost/benefit analysis, general
governance as well as organisational risk
management. Successful businesses manage their
risks, seek to achieve this satisfactorily, and
hence intelligently turn their risk management into
a market differentiator and business opportunity.
Directors, Boards and
entrepreneurs that effectively combine Business with
Technology, Enterprise with Assurance, the ability
to execute with Governance are more likely to
succeed. To achieve this tall order, organizations
large and small will do well to look closely at the
inherent judgment and philosophies promoted in the
frameworks you will be discussing today
The Assurance,
Governance and the Frameworks that you are looking
at here were created precisely as guidance for these
many economic players, for the SME and the large
corporation alike. Services need to be up and
running reliably, across borders, across
jurisdictions and across time-zones, otherwise
supply chains break down and trade is disrupted.
Frequently, service levels and business continuity
preparedness are sought from suppliers in the
acquisition phase, they loom large in the
negotiations among competing providers, and these
business concerns finally end up in contracts.
Implementing such frameworks in companies prepares
businesses for the requirements of the market
I appreciate the role
that you will be giving to SMEs in this conference—
this is the reality in Malta. You will be discussing
implementation, indeed, pragmatic implementation,
guided by the best-practices tried-and-tested in
companies overseas. I venture to guess the issue
will undoubtedly arise that since Malta’s
organizations tend to be smaller than corresponding
organizations overseas, the profession and
businesses here need to deliberate carefully how
this rich international guidance needs to be
tailored and customised to the reality of our
markets and our organizations.
Your profession is
right at the intersection between IT and Assurance,
between IT and Audit, between Technology and
Business. This gathering highlights how business and
technology, increasingly intertwined, have made IT
Governance an umbrella for service, quality,
business resilience, and information assurance. The
Internet, globalization and the resulting business
opportunity are bringing IT Governance and corporate
governance ever closer, and a matter for Board
responsibility
Corporate information is
an asset that needs to be valued and protected. The
issue of information as an asset of economic value
is coming to the fore, and information assurance is
increasingly taking the place it deserves in
management thinking. Without information that is
sound, complete, and with its confidentiality
safeguarded, there is no service and consequently no
trade — this is what is at stake, and it is on your
conference agenda. Regulators in more and more
countries, and in sector after sector, increasingly
favour adoption and use of Assurance and Governance
standards and frameworks. It is perhaps obvious to
note that today there is no corporate strategy
without IT strategy, and no corporate governance
without IT governance. The market has made this an
inevitable fact of economic life.
Just two years ago the
world was confident and optimistic: the emergent
economies were fuelling world growth; the EU took on
10 new Member-States and 70 million citizens in just
one day.
Malta was one of those
States; within one year we adopted the Euro, which
may, without controversy, be cited as a text-book
case of successful adoption. Government embarked on
e-Government, businesses in Malta were adopting
e-Commerce, our Banks adopted the Internet as an
innovative channel, with payments increasingly
becoming e-Payments. iGaming is now a mainstay of
the Maltese Economy, as are Financial Services.
Government promoted this development on several
fronts: through the educational system, through
incentive schemes, through well calibrated fiscal
measures, and by means of legislation. These are the
foundations on which we are building our Vision for
2015 on.
At the root of eServices
is a pre-condition. This ambitious agenda needs
social and economic progress at the most basic
level, that of the citizen. The numbers of Internet
users in Malta grows year-on-year, as do the numbers
of Computers and Mobile phones in use. This
progress, without which businesses and governments
would not invest in technological infrastructure and
Internet-enabled-information systems, is not a
phenomenon limited to only youth and business. This
is a technological adeptness and diffusion across
the board: in towns as well as in villages, and in
different age-groups and income brackets.
Inclusiveness was a Government objective as from day
one of this long journey.
This growth is not
limited to mobiles and ISP subscriptions. We are
seeing, over the years, more acquisition and
deployment of information systems in organizations
to manage the many resources of the enterprise, as
well as the business interactions of the latter with
Suppliers and Clients. Information Systems and
eServices are finally overcoming our geographical
and traditional isolation as a small Island-State:
one to the extremity of a large land-mass and an
economic powerhouse of wealthy business and
individual consumers. Government policies sought and
continue to seek opportunity for all of us, now that
well managed technology is killing distance and
shrinking timescales.
Against this backdrop
that I have described as a world “confident” and
“optimistic” just two years ago, I am pleased to
share a prudent optimism in our immediate future,
and more sanguine buoyancy for the years during
which Vision2015 unfolds
That Vision, currently
in the “reformation” phase as we improve our
thinking on the basis of present world scenarios,
envisions seven major pillars of substantial
socio-economic development, namely:
·
Transportation and Logistics
·
International Educational Services
·Financial
Services
·Advanced
manufacturing
·Tourism
·Life
Sciences
as well as eco-Gozo.
Any economic thinker, or
entrepreneur, any world-class management consultancy
will assert that there is no logistics or high-tech
manufacturing, no educational delivery to a global
audience over the Internet, and no design of new
materials, pharmaceutics or electronics, without
well-developed capabilities in:
·Software
·Telecoms,
and
·
Information Systems
All of our vision’s
pillars will require a vibrant, innovative and
sustainable ICT industry in Malta. Implementation of
the vision needs a local ICT industry maturing to
the point not only servicing the pillars, but indeed
using that local economic impetus as springboard to
export our ICT offering overseas. ICT requires no
raw materials, time and distance are no longer
barriers, so an increasing IT maturity, both in our
educational system and in the market, will bring
within Malta’s reach, a net earner for all of us
What will Malta’s
outward-looking, innate IT industry, exporter and
creator of wealth look like? The pillars and their
sub-niches will require increasing numbers of
mature, high calibre IT professionals delivering in
IT organizations such as:
·Software
Houses
·Data
Centres
·IT Service
Desks
A substantial local
software design and maintenance capability, and IT
service delivery in the form of locally situated and
locally staffed Data Centres and IT Service Desks
mean, over and above local high-paying jobs, an
increasing volume IP by Maltese people. This gradual
market evolution will be a strategic positioning of
Malta as an economy that; proposes, designs, and
creates. We envision such IT micro-organisation
maturing beyond being an enabler and a driver of
Vision2015 to becoming a fully-fledged sector in its
own right — a self-sustaining one with synergies and
international projection
This will be both an
opportunity and challenge on the professional
profiles and organisational players that I have
before me today. It projects, trust in our high-tech
but high- touch positioning, and confidence in
individuals and organisations as we see Vision 2015
come to fruition in the next years
Maltese businesses and
the start-up and global brands that choose to
operate from our shores now have a golden
opportunity to overcome our natural barriers and see
themselves as they are: just one-click away from
wealthy overseas customers. The transactional and
logistical costs and time-lags of old can be
overcome, with Malta increasingly perceived as a
value proposition based on the alertness and
competence of our professionals, and the
organization, technology and governance of its
agile, nimble businesses. Our smart efforts,
IT-enabled investments, both public and private, our
technical and management education, and membership
of an EU of 500 million sophisticated consumers
allow Malta to confidently and sustainably look
afar, indeed beyond the European Union
I wish you all a
pleasant day together, lots of generation of ideas,
and the singling out of opportunities for your
businesses to implement change, innovation and
improvement.
