Those of you struggling with bringing IT and business alignment to life through your ITIL® initiative may be surprised to learn that your salvation may lie in a free download.
Even with the improved use of organizational charts and metrics in ITIL v3, some practitioners have commented that the linkage to a sound maturity process is still lacking. This is where COBIT, which is available for free from http://www.isaca.org/, can assist.
Many companies that I work with have been using COBIT's Key Performance Indicators, Maturity Models and RACI Charts (which track Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed persons for every process) to provide metrics and structure for their ITIL processes.
COBIT is the governance framework that aligns business strategies and objectives with IT deliverables by identifying and analyzing the IT processes and measurements needed to construct processes that deliver desired business results.
COBIT provides the missing governance capabilities for your ITIL processes, helping you measure and assure performance and roll up the metrics to business requirements to provide a holistic view of your performance.
While ITIL does offer performance measurements and organizational information, in my opinion these don't roll up to the business level to the extent COBIT does.
For example, take a look at COBIT process DS1, Define and Manage Service Levels, which is defined as control over the IT processes of defining and managing service levels with the objective of ensuring the alignment of key IT services with business strategy. COBIT identifies requirements, inputs, outputs, report requirements, organizational impact, metrics and the maturity model (every COBIT process has its own maturity model to show you where you are and where you are going ) -- all of which can assist you in your ITIL journey.
So go to isaca.org and download COBIT. It's on me.
By the way, check back at isaca.org in the next few weeks for mappings of COBIT 4.1 to ITIL v3. We'll have two versions to choose from depending on whether you have an existing leaning towards COBIT or ITIL.
ITIL® is a Registered Trade Mark, and a Registered Community Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce, and is Registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.