15 January 2009, Ely, England – Compliance leader IT Governance is delighted to announce the publication of a landmark best practice governance guide by a leading expert in the widely deployed collaboration platform, IBM's Lotus Notes, which will be available at the upcoming Lotusphere 2009 event in Orlando (January 18-22nd).
Lotus Notes is now being seen as a potential danger area for today’s corporations by allowing business users to develop their own applications for all sorts of critical activities – from expenses through payroll to CRM and financial reporting. The fact that there is little or no formal control over any of these, particularly few adhering to Sarbanes-Oxley and Data Protection regulations for instance, leaves too many businesses exposed to regulatory failure.
Craig Schumann’s ‘Just Enough Governance for Notes’ is the first book to identify a ‘light touch’ approach as key to preserving the flexibility and agility that makes Notes so well-loved, while instituting enough governance to ensure that information security and regulatory compliance requirements are all met.
Schumann – a Senior Vice President for R&D at Notes developers TeamStudio – has set out to show how organisations can apply ‘Just Enough Governance’ to their Lotus Notes development areas to enable business users to retain development control, but without forcing the IT team to take control of something that no one really wants them to have to take control of.
Written for specialist and general readers alike, Schumann, who has a reputation second to none in the Notes world, here offers what internationally renowned Lotus Notes expert and commentator Thomas 'Duffbert' Duff cites as bridging “the gap between the ‘Wild, Wild West’ environment so often seen in Notes shops, and the approval- and documentation-heavy processes you see in other IT areas. Even better, it introduces the topic of governance in a way most Notes developers can relate to and accept”.
“The key thing about Lotus Notes is that it is a software platform that is used by people in the business, with little controls or governance – and so the business folk love it, because they can do what they want without waiting for IT to put it together for them,” maintains Alan Calder, Chief Executive of publishers IT Governance.
“But this is ungoverned and not sustainable in the present regulatory climate. So, what is the organisation to do? Pull Lotus Notes into the IT department, which business users will hate?
“Organisations should read this book because it has all the answers. It describes how organisations can apply ‘Just Enough Governance’ to their Lotus Notes development areas to enable business users to protect corporate information assets and also meet their aim of not stifling initiative by forcing the IT team to have to take control.”
‘Just Enough Governance for Notes’ (ISBN 978-1-905356-59-1) is priced at £39.95
for the UK at http://www.itgovernance.co.uk/products/2086 and $69.95 for the US at http://www.itgovernanceusa.com/product/1812.aspx. Sample copies of the book will be available at Lotusphere at the TeamStudio Stand.
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NOTES TO EDITORS
IT Governance Ltd is the one-stop shop for books, tools, training and consultancy for Governance, Risk Management and Compliance. It is a leading authority on data security and IT governance for business and the public sector. IT Governance is ‘non-geek’, approaching IT issues from a non-technology background and talking to management in its own language. Its customer base spans Europe, the Americas, the Middle East and Asia. More information is available at www.itgovernance.co.uk.
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