A survey revealing path towards service life cycle management in COBIT 5

Abstract

Information technology has become an indispensable unit of an enterprise life in current era. Its inception has changed the ways businesses are done today in a competitive environment. In order to get value from significant investments done on complex IT infrastructure, it should be efficiently governed and managed. IT governance and management is a part of overall corporate governance and management and plays a vital role in aligning IT with business strategies. Among the several frameworks proposed for IT governance, COBIT is the most comprehensive and diverse framework providing support for both governance and management at all levels in multiple business domains. COBIT provides a toolset to bridge the gap between control requirements, technical issues and business risks. In this study we provide a survey of a few implementations of COBIT framework in multiple domains. Based on the survey we state our findings and recommend its adoption to comprehend similar issues. Further we identified certain limitations of COBIT framework and addressed the integration of service life cycle management into the original framework. We added seven new processes to the process structure of COBIT 5 along with their high level objectives. Also we added a few control objectives to the existing processes of COBIT framework. The survey provides a clear understanding of each COBIT implementation and the elements of the framework addressed in each implementation. Our study serves as a guide for all COBIT implementers and helps them teach how to deal with different kinds of governance or management matters. Further how the framework can be enhanced to provide service life cycle management.