Model-Based IT Governance Maturity Assessments with Cobit

IT governance is an executive level concern in many enterprises today, but a method for credible, reliable, and cost-efficient IT governance maturity assessment has been lacking. Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (Cobit) is best practice in the area, but the method requires an experienced analyst to perform the assessment and the provided analysis framework is vague and ambiguous. This paper presents a Cobit based method designed to overcome these featured problems. It comprises a modeling language for IT governance based on Cobit, and a transparent analysis framework which enables aggregation of single metrics into comprehensive maturity scores. The applicability was tested in a small case study. Results demonstrate that the method can be used to conduct time-efficient, valid and reliable IT governance maturity assessments without the help of an experienced analyst.