IT Strategy – Key Concepts
The below can be seen as a Guideline that will assist with accomplishing goals as an IT professional.
Key concept: At its root “strategy” is essentially a plan that will be used to achieve a goal. Knowing this one can make the argument that the COBIT4 is the framework that assists with IT Strategy creation and implementation. The book mentions the concept of Business Orientation.
The following statements regarding Business Orientation can be found in section 3 of the 2007 textbook:
“The business orientation of COBIT consists of linking business goals to IT goals, providing metrics and maturity models to measure their achievement, and identifying the associated responsibilities of business and IT process owners.” [1, page 11]
“Business orientation is the main theme of COBIT. It is designed to be employed not only by IT service providers, users and auditors, but also as comprehensive guidance for management and business process owners. Defining a set of generic business and IT goals provides a more refined basis for establishing business requirements and developing the metrics that allow measurement against these goals. Every enterprise uses IT to enable business initiatives, and these can be represented as business goals for IT. Once the goals have been defined, they need to be monitored to ensure that actual delivery matches expectations.” [1, page 11]
These two passages show us that Business Orientation as it relates to COBIT deals with tying Business Goals to IT goals and the framework to implement the strategy which will accomplish these things.
Key concept: In COBIT5 the textbook puts major emphasis on the concept of Value. Chapter 4 is titled “Value Creation and Benefits Realisation” [2], and we can see that value is being presented as the backbone of strategy and giving purpose to business goals. Being that IT Strategy would be the action/activity that takes place, Value would be the “fuel” that drives these activities and keeps an organization focused on what they should or should not be doing. If there is no Value that can be identified, then one can make the argument that has nothing to do with or even goes against the identified IT Strategy. In COBIT4 Business Orientation initially but as mentioned as its main theme but as we can see COBIT5 goes more in depth into showing why IT and Business goals must be aligned and that is via Value.
Image Courtesy of Trabon Solutions
References:
- IT Governance Institute, IT Governance Using COBIT and ValIT: Student Book, 2ndEdition 2007
- ISACA, Basic Foundational Concepts Student Book: Using COBIT® 5. 2014
Acknowledgement:
IT7833 Exercise 2 – Key Concept Methods
IT Professional Toolkit 