Reference no: EM132884167

IT Governance for Emerging Digital Technologies

This assessment requires you to further apply the governance and change management theories, concepts, and frameworks introduced in the course. You will have to offer a proposal aimed at avoiding governance shortcomings in contemporary major IT projects and operations. Your proposed solution needs to strengthen IT governance to accommodate new challenges specifically in public sector and governmental organizations. You are therefore tasked with providing advice on how a particular Australian state government should prepare to deal with governance of emerging and wide-spreading AI systems that will be harnessed in government departments. In offering your advice for such new technologies and future IT projects in a business report, you are also asked to provide guidance of how to deal with the issues of managing cognitive bias in the development of governance practice for such novel digital technologies.

In recent years, the Victorian Government has sought to strengthen governance involving ICT investments. One of its initiatives has involved the creation of an ICT dashboard. This database seeks to plot the progress of current ICT projects in government departments. See the Victorian Government IT Dashboard.

While this initiative has seen some improvement in the public accountability of projects, there is still concern about project performance as measured by timely completions and costly overruns. Several Public Service Board Commissioners, however, are concerned about whether or not the dashboard system offers a fit for purpose governance system for ICT.

The Commissioners, in their deliberations, have been influenced by recent discussions about the impact of cognitive bias on decision-making. For instance, they have come across several informative articles in the business press.

Victoria has sought to enhance its project management involving ICT by publishing several guidelines. On inspection, however, the Commissioners have noticed that much of the advice offered appears to dwell on standard project management processes. Insufficient focus seems to center on the realities of decision-making behaviour in organizations. Likewise, scant consideration seems to be given to knowing-doing gaps that can frustrate effective governance.

As a consequence, the Commissioners are now interested in receiving advice about how such project ventures might be better managed, thus improving success rates and lowering public expenditures.

In their discussions, the Public Service Board Commissioners also have started to become worried about the governance processes involving AI applications that are likely to be implemented in the near future. In the past, the state's management of conventional ICT has been problematic and often lagging in effective execution. Two recent articles in Forbes have tweaked their attention. In turn, a current interview between two governance experts published in YouTube has heightened the Commissioners' interest.

The Commissioners are keen to adopt a more proactive stance when it comes to dealing with important emerging technologies that will be harnessed in government departments. Again, the Commissioners want to receive advice on how the state should prepare to deal with governance of AI systems.

In this assignment, you should consider yourself to be the selected government officer tasked with preparing the report that needs to deal with the issues of managing cognitive bias and the development of governance practice to deal with the rise of artificial intelligence applications. You would be reporting to the relevant Public Service Commissioners.

The report should have the following structure and cover the following topics:
• An introduction - introduce the topic of the report and explain how the report is structured.
• A background to the case - discuss the different types of cognitive bias and the need to improve the issues caused by them.
• An elaboration of how different debiasing techniques can contribute to a successful implementation and use of IT governance.
• A critical analysis of IT governance in the context of artificial intelligence technologies.
• A conclusion - restate the rationale that underlies your analysis and recommendations.
• A reference list containing a minimum of six (6) quality sources that demonstrate relevant, independent research.

Attachment:- Digital Technologies.rar