COBIT 5 is IT's next silver bullet: the ultimate meta-framework for all types of organizations on information governance.

Setting the scene
ISACA is an association of more than 110,000 individual members in 180 countries helping IT professionals achieve trust in, and value from, their information and information systems. One way is through the COBIT 5 business framework, which helps any organisation worldwide understand and implement effective governance and management of IT and bridging the gap between business and IT.  IT professionals need to talk the language of the business to help the business get the full benefits of IT. COBIT 5 provides that common language. 

If governance sets the direction in which the organization should move by understanding the needs of all stakeholders who are interested in the organization and who evaluate, direct and monitor (responsibility of the board of directors and its chairman), then management plans, builds, runs and monitors activities in alignment with the direction to achieve the organisation’s objectives (responsibility of the management team under the leadership of the CEO). 

IT governance is a corporate governance subset to guarantee that IT performance aligns with the business strategy and delivers the promised benefits, while allowing the organization to take advantage of opportunities and benefits and ensuring the resources are used responsibly and the risks related to its use are appropriately managed.

Marc Vael, Voorzitter

Why should you care about COBIT 5?
COBIT 5 is the default choice as overarching business information framework, even when it started nearly 20 years ago as an IT audit framework. COBIT 5 provides the principles, practices, analytics tools and models that are globally accepted and designed to help businesses maximize the value of their IT assets. If information is the currency of our time, it is necessary to build effective mechanisms for its administration.  COBIT 5 affects how you manage your organization and shows your progress at control and improvement. COBIT 5 can be customized to any business model, particular those that are technology-related. 

COBIT 5 drives transparency
Driving transparency into IT costs, benefits and risks is especially difficult for almost all IT organizations, because IT is considered by most corporate-finance organizations to be a cost center. This is a big problem since IT spend is presented based on technology expenditure. For the business, this makes IT spend look like a bunch of parts. With service-based costing as COBIT 5 suggests, the gulf between the business and IT can be eliminated because costs are presented at a level of indenture the business understands. In the budgeting season, the business and IT can talk about IT and its services from a value perspective. And, IT can have a seat at the table and ask: Why are we still investing in this service when only one person is using it and it’s costing us X euro? 

Improving your organisation using COBIT 5
COBIT 5 makes it easier to implement information governance in two ways. First, COBIT 5 provides the overall business / IT governance guidance that makes information-governance initiatives more successful more quickly. Second, because of COBIT 5’s end-to-end breadth, COBIT 5 maps nicely with other generally accepted principles.

Can COBIT 5 be used in a small and medium sized organisation?
Yes. One of COBIT’s strengths has always been its flexibility. Because the framework is not intended to be implemented in full, smaller organizations can choose the processes most critical to their stakeholders and start there, with no need for a large staff or large budget. Small- and medium-sized businesses do not need to reinvent the wheel.

ISACA itself uses COBIT 5 as its internal framework.  Several case studies are available on the ISACA web site.

Conclusion
COBIT 5 is the meta-framework for organisations: the ultimate framework to structure all other Bodies of Knowledge. COBIT 5 is as much a planning and design tool as an assessment/measurement one. Other Bodies of Knowledge come in as elaboration when more detail is required. IT managers want a framework that covers all of IT; and they want as much guidance as possible from that single source.  Since COBIT 5 comes from a credible and non-commercial organisation with a clear commitment to open content and international community involvement means it becomes the natural choice to assess, to frame, to define, to justify, to audit. 

8 reasons to have your own copy ?of COBIT 5 today:

• Purpose. COBIT 5 is a meta-framework. It is intended to be a comprehensive description of all IT practices compared to other Bodies of Knowledge (BoKs), which all have their own particular bias or area of interest.
• Coverage. COBIT 5 covers more practices than any other BoKs.
• Rigour. COBIT 5 is systematically numbered and consistently structured.
• Benchmark. You can assess against COBIT 5; it has clearly defined requirements.
• Credibility. COBIT 5 is written by a team, not one or two authors. All COBIT contributors and reviewers are published. COBIT 5 is owned, published and used by a not-for-profit membership organisation.
• Accessibility. COBIT 5 is very low cost, especially when compared to daily rates of consultants. 
• Novelty. COBIT 5 is IT’s next silver bullet.
• Pure Governance. COBIT 5 will be embraced because the realisation is dawning that cloud, BYOD, mobile, etc. are business decisions—not IT decisions.