IT Governance Frameworks as Methods

IT management of today only to a surprisingly low degree is based on sound methods. Rather it is considered still as an art attributed to the capabilities of individual managers. On the other hand, there is little academic support for the challenges of IT management. To fill this obvious gap, various best practice frameworks have been developed. These frameworks cover both support of management tasks and improvement of compliance with regulations. Both areas can be subsumed under the topic IT governance. Whereas the frameworks reflect best practice experience, they do not provide prove of e.g. completeness and coherence with respect to the application area they were designed for. To undertake a step in this direction we will explore, to what degree the well known IT governance framework COBIT may be classified as a method. By analyzing the underlying logical and semantically rich structure of this framework we gain insights on how to compare and integrate further frameworks with COBIT. We will conclude by giving indications on how we intend to implement IT governance frameworks into a toolset based on semantic nets.