Cobit, a way to track decisions

COBIT is seen by some IT people as a new trend and something we all should have in our organizations, bla, bla, bla…

But, who promotes COBIT or other governance models? The answer is easy: The business.

They are fed up of spending money on IT transformations, changes of provider, investments on pilots, and any other friki ideas the IT guys have.

Business knows the dependency they have of technology, IT is not a secondary department anymore, and this makes that the IT strategy is part of the governance model of the company.

Time to market cycles of products and solutions continue becoming shorter and shorter, so there’s no chance for spending resources and miss market opportunities. The company moves and IT has to follow the move.

And what about innovation and new fresh ideas? They have to be there, but in a governed way, supported by a strong business cases.

Governance models is not a trend, is a need for IT to really behave as a core unit of the company.

One of the main uses of Cobit is to track decisions and business cases. Business is not stupid and they now have a way to see changes of opinions.

For instance, IT decides to go with a provider, they spend million dollars on a transition and 1 year later they find that the new provider sucks.

They are willing to came back to their old provider, that is still there, and that suddenly it was not much bad as they initially described.

What does IT do? They are going to continue with the existing provider, or they will bet to go to another new provider, but they will never will come back to the old one, even if it makes sense.

Why? It’s a political decision, to comeback to the old provider means to recognizes to the business that they were wrong on the strategy; and this is something that is not going to happen.