Demystifying Cobit and ITIL

Our senior IT executives are being held accountable to better manage the quality and reliability of IT in business and respond to a growing number of regulatory and contractual requirements. Every enterprise needs to tailor the use of standards and practices to suit its individual requirements. Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) can both play a useful role in IT governance.

Very simply COBIT helps our senior management teams to define what should be done and ITIL provides the framework for how to manage our services.

When we think about COBIT and IT governance at the most fundamental level, there are four questions that every leader asks him or herself when it comes to IT initiatives:

Is my IT organization doing the right things?
Are we doing them the right way?
Are we getting them done well?
Are we getting value from our IT department?

COBIT helps answer these questions by defining IT activities in a generic process model within four domains along with a set of information criteria. The four domains are: Plan and Organize, Acquire and Implement, Deliver and Support, and Monitor and Evaluate. The COBIT framework provides a reference process model and common language for everyone in an enterprise to view and manage IT activities.

ITIL speaks more to an operational level of service management and the framework answers these questions:

What are my IT services?
What are best practices for managing my services?
Are we following best practices for our processes?
How do we monitor and measure our services?

These questions are answered by following the guidance given by the ITIL framework. The ITIL framework has 5 lifecycle stages, Strategy, Design, Transition, Operations and Continual Service Improvement.

By an organization knowing what it should be doing and combining that with best practice on how to accomplish these tasks, top management, business management, auditors, compliance officers and IT managers can work together to make sure IT best practices lead to regulatory compliance with cost-effective and well-controlled IT delivery.

Comments

Four Service Characteristics

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The New Four Ps of Service Management

By Donna Knapp For years, people , process , and technology (PPT) was a widely recognized framework for balancing and integrating the components needed to achieve optimal performance and outcomes. In the ITIL v3 Service Design publication, this framework was expanded to the four Ps: people , processes , products , and partners . ITIL 4 has further expanded and evolved this framework to the four dimensions of service management. These four dimensions are collectively critical to the effective and efficient facilitation of value for customers and other stakeholders in the form of products and services. The four dimensions of service management are: Organizations and people Information and technology Partners and suppliers Value streams and processes. These four dimensions represent perspectives which are relevant to the whole service value system (SVS), including the entirety of the service value chain and all ITIL practices. Each ITIL practice is a set of organizational resources base...

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