To COBIT 5 or not to COBIT 5, that is the question
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I have some good news about the adoption of COBIT 5: it has many improvements to the actual implementation of its contents.
The first of these is the "goals cascade". Why not actually new in this version of COBIT, it is now a) prominently displayed and b) better-complemented with "balanced score card" and "generic business objective" materials. This mapping system allows for mapping business objectives into "IT goals" (in the case of my current employer, this covers almost everything we do), and from those goals mapping to the IT functions that require attention.
Using the explicit goals crafted by our President, I've derived the following as our areas for concentration of efforts:
- Ensure Risk Optimisation
- Manage the IT Framework
- Manage Human Resources
- Manage Programs and Projects
- Manage Changes
That's just five areas of thirty-seven. Next stop: reading each of those to determine what concrete take-aways I can pursue in terms of processes, metrics, tools, and the owners of all of those.
A second improvement is the expansion of the scope to manage the entire enterprise-wide governance and management regime. I did this myself with COBIT 4.1 with mixed results, and welcome the guidance in 5.
A vastly expanded RACI chart that includes several useful committees that I've actually implemented (but were not prominent in COBIT 4).
I'm actually looking forward to this.