Chaired by the senior deputy vice-chancellor, who is often acting vice-chancellor, and with a balance of senior academics including senior people from computer science and information systems, as well as senior administrative staff and the CIO and university secretary, group members have taken a couple of years to get to understand each other and the different expertise they bring to bear. It also took time to develop a proper planning approach, a governance model, to implement CobiT and to achieve a better understanding of finances and how finance is to be managed. Now, Rouse says, it is working extremely well.

"The senior deputy vice-chancellor who chairs [the information plan and advisory committee] says in her view, and she probably chairs 20 committees, that it is the best committee because people want it to work. They see the importance of it for the university, they want the university to move forward, and they're prepared to make decisions on behalf of the university rather than on behalf of their own specific interest," Rouse says.

"And in terms of demonstrating the maturity, the group now has been together for a couple of years, and particularly in the last 12 months they, in my view, have moved forward significantly, because they have made some critical university decisions which were difficult and in the past probably wouldn't have been made."

Rouse says the group has argued vigorously that certain decisions in IT or certain systems that the university was moving forward on needed to be reversed out of or changed. That may not seem significant, he believes, until you consider that universities sometimes find it very difficult to change their minds.

"And to get to the point where the committee was able to - in an informed, dispassionate way - make a very critical decision, and there were two or three made last year, to me again suggested a degree of maturity that people were thinking about the organisation: What are we to do to move the organisation forward?"

The committee also has a key role to play in building and developing a planning infrastructure for the organisation.

Rouse can imagine some CIOs being reluctant to surrender turf and seeing board-level governance as a threat. Partly that is a matter of personality, he argues. But he insists at Curtin it has proved a boon. Towards the end of last year it was discovered the proposed budget for 2003 was short by a couple of million dollars, or about 10 per cent of the budget. The committee was able to argue with the university executive on behalf of the ICT environment and received an additional allocation in a way which he, as a CIO, would never have been able to do.

"I would be lined up against all the executive teams and their requirements and other parts of the university. But to have a committee of about 12 people, and very senior people, who clearly understood that I wasn't arguing on behalf of the CIO - I was arguing on behalf of the university - gave me very powerful support from a well-informed and well-respected group within the university."

That makes the information plan advisory committee incredibly valuable, at least in light of Curtin's circumstance and Rouse's personality as an acting CIO, including the overwhelming importance he places at Curtin on achieving collaboration and bringing people together.

"We've now got some fantastic examples of collaboration between IS, some of the teaching divisions, some of their brighter students, in doing things which wouldn't have happened otherwise," he says.