IT Governance
Effective IT Governance is achieved by doing the right things, the right way and doing them well. Constant monitoring to ensure that benefits are being realised is important to maintain course. These can be effectively implemented using the COBIT and VALIT frameworks. They address the What, Why and How of IT Governance.
IT Governance embodies good practices to ensure that IT supports an enterprise's business objectives. Good governance over IT assets enables the enterprise to fully utilize its information to maximize benefits, increase efficiency, take advantage of opportunities and gain competitive advantage. IT Governance requires that organisations satisfy quality, fiduciary and security requirements of their information assets. They must also optimize the use of all IT resources including applications, information, infrastructure and people. This would require the top management to understand the architecture of the enterprise for IT and what controls it should provide.
IT is no longer about implementing IT solutions, it is all about implementing `IT Enabled Change’. It implies greater complexity and risk than ever before. It can bring huge rewards but only with the right governance, management processes and full commitment and engagement from all management levels. Without effective governance & good management there is significant opportunity to destroy value.
IT Governance Frameworks - COBIT and VALIT
COBIT and VALIT provide good practices across domain and process frameworks and present activities in a manageable and logical structure. They help optimise IT-enabled investments, ensure service delivery and provide a measure against which to judge when things go wrong. COBIT and VALIT complement each other. While COBIT is concerned with the 'Hows', VALIT is concerned with the 'Whats' and the 'Whys'.
VALIT addresses the questions, ' Are we doing the right things?' and 'Are we getting the benefits?'. COBIT addresses the questions, 'Are we doing things the right way?' and 'Are we doing them well?'. VALIT is a framework for business governance of information systems. It involves selecting and managing the right portfolio of IT-enabled investments that is focused on business strategy and provides metrics for close control on benefits realisation.
COBIT is concerned with IT governance of information systems. It is business oriented and process focused. The whole 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.It has a process model with enterprise architecture concepts that help identify the resources essential for process success, viz, applications, information, infrastructure and people. Download a presentation on VALIT which should be for information and education purposes only).