Mike The Architect

Clarifying Alignment of Frameworks for Business Benefit

Most organizations employ multiple frameworks and standards for implementing and controlling technology. Here are some publications that map COBIT to other sources of guidance. While this is slightly out of date in terms of TOGAF it is still an interesting read to see how these frameworks relate.

COBIT Mapping Overview of International IT Guidance 2nd Edition

This document can be used to align guidance supporting IT governance, especially regarding IT control and IT security guidance in relationship to COBIT. It lists over a dozen international standards/guidance, and for each one provides a classification, a short overview of the contents and the business driver for implementing the guidance, and the risks of noncompliance. Included are:

• COBIT
• COSO
• ITIL
• ISO/IEC 17799:2005
• FIPS Pub 200
• ISO/IEC TR13335
• ISO/IEC 15408 2005/Common Criteria/ITSEC
• PRINCE2
• PMBOK
• TickIT
• CMMI
• TOGAF 8.1
• IT Baseline Protection Manual
• NIST 800-14.

Aligning COBIT 4.1, ITIL V3 and ISO/IEC 27002 for Business Benefit

IT best practices should be aligned to business requirements and processes. Organizations often use multiple frameworks to inform how to achieve this. This management briefing is the result of a joint study initiated by the UK's Office of Government Commerce and the IT Governance Institute. It was first published in November 2005, and was updated in August 2008 to reflect the latest versions of three sets of guidance:

• ITIL V3-Published by the UK government to provide a best practice framework for IT service management
• COBIT 4.1-Published by ITGI and positioned as a high-level governance and control framework over IT processes
• ISO/IEC 27002:2005-Published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electro technical Commission (IEC) a to provide a framework of a standard for information security management

The appendices provide mappings:

• COBIT to sections of ITIL and ISO/IEC 27002
• ITIL key topics to COBIT
• ISO/IEC 27002 classifications to COBIT

 

Source: http://www.sox-online.com/cobit_mapping.html

EA & ITIL Getting Closer Aligned?

Great post on Jeff Adkin's blog, Service Oriented Abstraction. As many of you know I have talked about this too (ITIL moving towards EA & Making Sense of EA Standards). This is further evidence that these disjointed enterprise functions are starting to come together.

Finally!

Check out "Intersection between Enterprise Architcture, ITIL and the SOA Movement". He has some high level meta-models and a study from Amazon.

Governance For Your OBA's

In last weeks session I was asked about governance and OBAs (at least from a server side perspective). I am happy to report that the community is concerned with governance as well. Microsoft IT Team Site Life Cycle Management Beta 1 was created on Codeplex and is intended to provide governance and manageability samples and tools designed to help IT Professionals management SharePoint Products and Technologies deployments. 

Upcoming tools include an implementation of site/web lifecycle management based on the Site Delete and Confirmation feature, the Microsoft IT Site Delete Capture 1.0 feature, and additional out-of-the-box functionality.  A sample auditing configuration solution deployment package will be introduced in the September-October timeframe that provides guidance on auditing and the management of content types across site collections.

Check out some of more governance content:

SharePoint Technology Governance Information on TechNet

SharePoint Governance posts on Joel's Blog

Manageability and Governance Post

Key Governance Considerations

Information Policies and Auditing Post

Information Architecture Post

Logical Architecture Samples

 

Tags: OBA

ITIL moving towards Enterprise Architecture

Great find on Van Wiles Blog on ITIL and Enterprise Architecture that shows yet another framework is moving more to an Enterprise Architecture style.

It stimulated some thought around the new framework. I think overall this is a good thing. However, by moving more into this space there is going to be additional overlap in the EA space when it comes to frameworks and methodologies. I’m not a huge fan of the level of coverage that the current frameworks provide. There is way too many gaps and they only address specific components of EA.

ITIL is still missing some critical EA components but it has many of the operational pieces nailed and if they bridge the enterprise components this could be a real contender in the EA space.

For Example: TOGAF addresses more of the methodology and best practices bit lacks on the analytical side. Whereas Zachmann has a strong analytical side but when it comes to process it falls a bit short.

If you are familiar with Enterprise Architecture frameworks, this should look familiar.  Here's a picture:

I got this picture from a new whitepaper by Sharon Taylor and Ken Turbitt on the BMC website: http://www.bmc.com/USA/Communities/attachments/BMC_BPWP_ITIL_Version_3_BSM.pdf

Some EA frameworks stop at the implementation level, but ITIL v3 takes it through transition (roll-out) and operation, plus continual service improvement, which feeds back into strategy and next generation design.  The whitepaper gives you a better feeling for ITIL V3 - I just thought it was cool to see the EA approach showing up in ITIL.  The other cool thing is that ITIL is finally adopting some of the terms and practices that BMC has been using for several years.

Tags: Enterprise Architecture ITIL Frameworks