A Bridge between Practice and Research: Which is the Best Governance Vehicle

In order to successfully govern an enterprise, business and information technology must be aligned. With proper alignment comes many benefits, including improved risk mitigation and more effective use of IT resources. Undoubtedly, the challenge and complexity of this endeavour is enormous and has previously been addressed in research literature and by practitioners. The Strategic Alignment Maturity Assessment Framework is a comprehensive tool for evaluation of business-IT alignment. The framework has roots in academic research and aims at analyzing the current situation in an organization. Further, it provides hands-on suggestions on how alignment can be improved. Based on the Strategic Alignment Model, it is incrementally developed through studies of enablers and inhibitors of alignment, and validated in more than 50 cases in Fortune 500 companies. On the other hand, The Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) has emerged from best-practice and has recently been released in version 4.0. It is based on the analysis and harmonisation of existing IT standards and conforms to generally accepted governance principles. In this paper, The Strategic Alignment Maturity Assessment Framework and Cobit 4.0 are compared and discussed from an implementation point of view. In order to successfully achieve an alignment of business and IT, which framework is the governance vehicle that best suits the purpose?