The Main Benefits of COBIT in a High Public Educational Institution - a Case Study

Currently, organizations move from the need to produce high rates of profitability, by the satisfaction of their customers, partners or employees, and by the maintenance of high levels of competitiveness to enable them to face competition and ensure their survival. With the evolution of Information Systems and the Information Technology, increasingly organizations based its activities on these systems and technologies. There are several guidelines oriented to the management and control certain sectors of Information Technology like ISO 9001 standard, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), ISO 27001 standard, CMM (Capability Maturity Model), COSO (Committee of Sponsoring Organizations) but the COBIT – Control Objectives for Information and Technology is the framework that covers all activities related to Information Technologies for the IT Governance. Considering the stated advantages of COBIT we present in this study the main benefits of using it for IT Governance in a High Public Portuguese Educational Institution. As part of the applicability of a Quality Management System (ISO 9001 standard certification), it was implemented the COBIT guidelines first to ensure the certification and next to implement mechanisms to make the IT Governance especially to manage and control the IT and IS. The Institution has improved significantly the quality of services, reduced the execution time of tasks in about 25%, monitor and control more efficiency the technological infrastructure, reduced 30% in the number of incidents resolved and finalized by the various informatics departments and reduced 10% in the number of reopened incidents.