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Are Your IT and Strategic Business Goals

Aligned?
By Alexander Zapata, CISA, CGEIT, CRISC, COBIT 5 Implementation and Assessor, ISO 22301 LI, ISO
27001 and Foundations, PMP
COBIT Focus | 9 May 2016

Developing and using models to help represent relationships between business strategy and IT is an effective
method to show the strategic effect of IT within the enterprise. As more and more business commerce becomes
automated, the growing impact of IT on business strategy, such as the development of a sustained competitive
advantage in a highly connected world, becomes increasingly evident.

Alignment of IT and business strategies is paramount for achieving and maintaining a leadership position. Today,
the elements that differentiate one successful organization from another are difficult to observe and measure as
the power of imitation levels the playing field, making a business-driven, information-centric and technology-
supported strategy imperative.

How Does COBIT 5 Contribute to the Alignment of Goals?

COBIT 5 is an integrated framework that facilitates the achievement of the businesss strategic goals and solidifies
value through an effective IT governance and management approach.

COBIT 5 provides for the governance and management of enterprise IT (GEIT) in a holistic way for the whole
organization, taking into account the needs of business and functional area stakeholders and driving the businesss
strategic goals in an end-to-end fashion throughout the enterprise. Because COBIT 5 aims to help organizations
achieve balance in financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth goal sets, the framework may be
applied to public, private or nonprofit organizations.

Upon adopting COBIT 5, the organization will be able to identify strengths and weaknesses associated with its IT
processes and environment. This, in turn, will identify areas where processes can be optimized to better support
the organizations goals and provide for safer, more dependable operations. Similarly, the organization will be able
to ensure that IT has the correct direction, i.e., alignment with strategic business goals.

Implementation Stages
A successful strategy for implementing COBIT 5 always begins with identifying the drivers for developing the
organizations goals and the primary results the organization would like to achieve, whether it be realizing the
benefits of a strategy or optimizing risk or resources. Once this is understood, an implementation of COBIT 5 should
consider the stages shown in figure 1.

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 Figure 1COBIT 5 Implementation Stages

One Identify relevant business and IT goals

Two Identify IT critical processes, considering strategic goals

and risk

Three Measure processes through a capability maturity model

(process assessment model [PAM])

Four Understand the desired target capability level

Five Define improvement strategies based on the current and

target capability levels

Six Develop effectiveness indicators based on the target

capability level and balanced scorecard (BSC) elements

Execute the action plan and implement the improvement

Seven strategies

Eight Measure results with effective indicators integrated in a

BSC

Source: A. Zapata. Reprinted with permission.

ISACA provides some related COBIT 5 materials that can be used to obtain additional references to this suggested

strategy, including the COBIT 5 Framework, COBIT 5: Enabling Processes, COBIT 5 Process Assessment Model

(PAM): Using COBIT 5 and COBIT Self-Assessment Guide: Using COBIT 5.

Conclusion
COBIT 5 provides a powerful framework for the identification of enterprise goals. It also enables each critical
process to be directly aligned to achievement of these goals in a way that can be easily measured and
communicated. By applying the proven and efficient implementation strategy suggested, any organization can
understand how effectively it is achieving these goals and ensure transparency across all functional areas.

Alexander Zapata, CISA, CGEIT, CRISC, COBIT 5 Implementation and Assessor, ISO 22301 LI, ISO 27001
and Foundations, PMP
Is an international consultant in IT governance and IT improvement with experience in Mexico, Colombia, Panama
and Peru. He is also an expert instructor and COBIT 5 Accredited Trainer. He can be reached at
azapatacolombia@yahoo.com.

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