Wim Van Grembergen

The IT Balanced Scorecard as a Framework for Enterprise Governance of IT

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a performance management system that enables businesses to drive strategies based on measurement and follow-up. The BSC is initially developed at enterprise level by Kaplan and Norton. The BSC can however easily be applied to information technology (IT) investments, projects or departments as an IT performance management and alignment instrument. This chapter discusses how the IT BSC can be used as an instrument for Enterprise Governance of IT and also includes a detailed case study.

COBIT as a Framework for Enterprise Governance of IT

Val IT is a relatively new framework issued by the IT Governance Institute, which mainly focuses on the business responsibilities in IT value creation. This framework starts from the premise that value creation out of IT investments is a business responsibility in the first place. To support business people in organizing and developing these responsibilities, Val IT presents a set of IT-related business processes and associated key management practices, management guidelines and maturity models. Val IT is complementary to COBIT and follows the same structure and templates as provided in the COBIT manuals.

Concepts of Enterprise Governance of IT

Enterprise Governance of IT is a relatively new concept in literature and is gaining more and more interest in the academic and practitioner’s world. Enterprise Governance of IT addresses the definition and implementation of processes, structures and relational mechanism that enable both business and IT people to execute their responsibilities in support of business/IT alignment and the creation of value from IT-enabled business investments. As an example of its growing importance, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued a new worldwide ISO standard in this domain in 2008. This chapter defines the core concepts around Enterprise Governance of IT as a means to enable business/IT alignment and business value from IT.

Guidelines for the Implementation of Enterprise Governance of IT

There is no real “silver bullet” (the ideal way) for implementing and maintaining effective Enterprise Governance of IT within an organization. Having developed a high-level Enterprise Governance of IT model does not imply that governance is actually working in the organization. Conceiving the governance model is the first step, implementing it into the organization is the next challenging step. An important challenge is, how do you get started? This chapter provides some guidelines to get started and outlines a balanced scorecard for Enterprise Governance of IT, to manage and measure the outcome of the governance project. Readers who are not familiar with the balanced scorecard perspective should first read Chapter 4 on the IT Balanced Scorecard.

The Impact of Enterprise Governance of IT on Business/IT Alignment

Previous chapters described what Enterprise Governance of IT is about and how a set of practices can be leveraged to implement Enterprise Governance of IT. In this chapter, the impact of Enterprise Governance of IT implementations on business/IT alignment will be discussed. The first question is how an organization can measure and evaluate its current status of business/IT alignment. This discussion is supplemented with a benchmarking case, where business/IT alignment was measured for the Belgian financial services sector. Next, the impact of Enterprise Governance of IT practices on business/IT alignment is analyzed and illustrated with cases.

COBIT as a Framework for IT Assurance

In previous chapter, COBIT was introduced and discussed as a powerful framework to implement Enterprise Governance of IT. However, COBIT also provides in-depth support to execute IT assurance/audit assignments. This chapter explains how the COBIT concepts can be leveraged in the context of IT assurance. Readers who are not familiar with COBIT are recommended to first read Chapter 5 where the concepts of COBIT are explained.