It is with great pleasure that I write the preface for this international Compact special. KPMG IT Advisory has published Compact magazine now for 38 years. What started in the early seventies as an internal magazine is now a leading magazine in the Dutch marketplace. As we run a mature IT advisory practice, we want to share our insights with our worldwide clients, our current and future workforce, and the community. All the articles have been written by KPMG staff and our clients personally. We continue to be grateful that our staff and our clients are willing to share their expertise in this way.
In the intervening years we have published on topics relevant to the IT life cycle, both from an advisory and an assurance perspective. Nowadays, we live in a business environment that is dynamic and global. We still see rapid developments that have a great impact on the way we live, both in our personal and professional lives. We easily adopt new personal technology like tablet computers and smart phones, but on the other hand, businesswise we still struggle to find the right ways to handle privacy, to keep control over our master data and to get the right information from existing systems. Not to mention the effort we have to make to maintain control over our large-scale IT implementations.
So it is essential that our clients have access to sound business advice. Not only because it is very expensive to get IT wrong, but also because these days you have to get your IT right in order to get your business done.
I am very proud to present to you this international edition, which covers a selection of articles published in Compact in recent years. It is intended to give you insight into recent developments on some of the issues that we currently work on with our clients. Of course, this special edition contains only a selection of issues. By no means is it intended to cover all of our activities.
I would like to thank all the authors as well as our editors and editorial secretariat for their contribution to Compact. I hope that you will all greatly enjoy reading this publication, and we look forward to your feedback.
Happy reading,
Hans Donkers
KPMG partner, editor-in-chief of Compact
