Summary
Highlights
COBIT 2019 defines 40 governance and management objectives, with 5 dedicated to governance and 35 to management. These objectives are crucial for ensuring IT supports strategic organizational goals. Governance processes are the board's responsibility, while management processes fall under senior and middle management.
The 40 objectives are grouped into five domains. There is one governance domain, EDM (Evaluate, Direct, and Monitor), overseeing strategic direction and monitoring. The four management domains are APO (Align, Plan, and Organize), BAI (Build, Acquire, and Implement), DSS (Deliver, Service, and Support), and MEA (Monitor, Evaluate, and Assess).
A COBIT 2019 governance system is built upon seven interactive components: Processes, Organizational Structures, Information, People/Skills/Competencies, Principles/Policies/Procedures, Culture/Ethics/Behavior, and Services/Infrastructure/Applications. All these components must be implemented to achieve the defined governance and management objectives.
Components can be generic, applicable universally, or variants, tailored for specific contexts like priority areas (e.g., cybersecurity, cloud computing, privacy). Priority areas allow organizations to focus on specific concerns using COBIT's framework.
COBIT 2019 introduces 11 design factors to customize a governance system based on an organization's unique characteristics. These include Enterprise Strategy, Enterprise Goals, Risk Profile, IT-Related Issues (pain points), Threat Landscape, Compliance Requirements, Role of IT, Sourcing Model, IT Implementation Methods, Technology Adoption Strategy, and Enterprise Size.
The Goals Cascade is a tool to prioritize the 40 governance and management objectives. It starts by analyzing stakeholder needs, which translate into enterprise goals, then alignment goals, and finally, specific governance and management objectives. This qualitative approach helps identify the most critical objectives for an organization, enabling a phased, continuous improvement implementation strategy. While effective, the design factors offer a more comprehensive quantitative approach.