COBIT AND ITIL

hank

MARQUIS

By Hank Marquis
As many of you know, our Foundations program presents the idea that ITIL requires something to guide it; that is, ITIL is the "what" not the "how". We have proposed COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and related Technology) as the method to measure ITIL. Issued by the IT Governance Institute and now in its third edition, COBIT increasingly accepted as good practice for control over information, IT and related risks. COBIT defines 34 IT processes and includes tools for Performance measurement (outcome measures and performance drivers for all IT processes); a list of critical success factors that provides succinct, non-technical best practices for each IT process and Maturity models to assist in benchmarking and decision-making for capability improvements.

With regard to ITIL, think of COBIT as defining the CSF and related KPIs that ITIL processes must deliver against -- all within a guidance framework tied back to audits. And this is why COBIT and ITIL are so important right now -- think audit: Sarbanes-Oxley, The US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), GLBA -- The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, also known as the Financial Modernization Act, and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council's (FFIEC) [Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Credit Union Administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.] All require audits of IT.

We at itSM Solutions have promulgated COBIT as a "higher level" framework for measuring ITIL implementations and tying IT back to business drivers to achieve alignment. Well, it seems we were on to something! Last week the IT Governance Institute (ITGI) and UK government’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) recently released a joint paper to explain how COBIT and ITIL should be used together to provide a hierarchy of guidance! They also said the ITGI and OGC plan to further align terminology and content of their practices with other practices to facilitate easier integration. This means going forward as ITIL and COBIT mature, we can expect even further integration.

You can read the paper here, but suffice to say we are ahead of this curve since we talk about this now. Going forward, we plan to integrate COBIT more completely into all our courses where appropriate.

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