Val IT and CobiT
IT Governance comprises 5 focus areas: Strategic Alignment, Value Delivery, Risk Management, Resource Management and Performance Measurement. The key element here is Value Delivery: what is the organization's ability to create value from IT investments? If there is no added value of an IT investment, there is no reason to do the investment.
The Val IT framework allows business managers to get this business value from IT investments, by providing a governance framework that consists of a set of guiding principles for a number of processes:
- Value Governance
- Portfolio Management
- Investment Management
Another important framework for IT Governance is CobiT. CobiT is business focussed and proposes a controls-based approach to IT management in 4 broad domains: ‘Plan & Organize’, ‘Acquire & Implement’, ‘Deliver & Support’ and ‘Monitor & Evaluate’.
Val IT extends and complements the COBIT framework and together, they provide a comprehensive control framework for IT Governance. Specifically, Val IT focuses on the investment decision (are we doing the right things?) and the realisation of benefits (are we getting the benefits?), while COBIT focuses on the execution (are we doing them the right way, and are we getting them done well?).
For our IT Governance assignments, we usually take Val IT (and COBIT) as a basis, but this is often complemented by other best practice sources like frameworks of Ross and Weill where the focus is more on the decision making process.
