Last month I attended the ISACA International Board of Director's meeting that was held in Frankfurt, Germany.  The meeting was held in conjunction with EuroCACS 2009 and the Europe/Africa area chapter leadership meeting. 

I had the good fortune to meet with many ISACA chapter leaders and many commented that they appreciated ISACA international president Lynn Lawton's address to the group and were excited to learn of ISACA's future strategic plans.  Lynn mentioned the recently unanimously approved strategic direction which was discussed at the board meeting.  I thought I'd mention the highlights of her speech so others could also be made aware.

In June 2008, ISACA's Strategic Advisory Group (SAG) recognized that this would be an opportune time to revisit strategy. They recommended that a comprehensive study be done, using McKinsey & Company.

The study acknowledged these great strengths: 

• Several years of membership and financial growth (membership is rapidly approaching 100,000)
• Reputation for leadership in our professional field
• An incredibly large and enthusiastic group of volunteers always ready to pitch in and contribute

It was confirmed that our core constituency is in IT assurance, as you might expect, information security and IT-with information security and IT growing most rapidly. Those three areas combined make up a bit over three-fourths of membership.  We learned from the survey that what members are most hungry for is practical, how-to information. And we learned that we have built an extremely complex system of governance-one that may at times hinder our ability to work as effectively as we could.

So in looking at the next evolution of our strategic direction, we endeavored to answer a few basic questions:

• What core competencies have made us successful and how can we continue to build on them?
• How can we continue to create opportunities for our constituents to increase their skills and influence?
• What enhancements need to be made internally to execute strategy?

The Board of Directors discussed all this during its meeting and approved-unanimously and with great enthusiasm-a basic strategic direction. 

With that approval, we've made a huge step forward, but we still have a lot of work to do. Most of what we approved was conceptual in nature-now we need to sit down and put some meat behind it-prepare the tactical plans that will make those concepts reality.

The feedback shows ISACA has a fantastic opportunity as unlike many organizations, we are in the fortunate position of being able to grow on the success we already have.  So, the strategy moving forward will be directed at making our members better skilled and recognized and deliver value.

I encourage all of you to watch in the upcoming weeks for more detailed information on the new strategic direction and I will keep you posted on this Blog and my Twitter account. 

More information will be available at the North America CACS, May 3-7 in Orlando, Florida - will be blogging on this event shortly!