Moving your ITIL Implementation Forward - part 3

Before I start, my apologies for failing to get this up on Tuesday 25th March as hoped. I almost wonder whether I should start following ITIL principles for my blog posting regime ;)

Today's post was going to be the final part in this series. However, as I was writing it became longer and longer so I figure you can have a part 4 on Friday!.


Georges Ataya and Rob Stroud - IT Governance for the Real World, Mapping COBIT & ITIL
This presentation started off with a little background about ISACA and the ITGI. One thing that I wasn't aware of is the introduction of a qualification: Certification in the Governance of Enterprise IT (CGEIT). Aimed squarely at professionals and management who are responsible for governance in one of the domains, the first exam will be in December 2008.

The presenters reiterated the message that most of us reading on the subject already know: COBIT and ITIL are complementary - they are not competitors. (As mentioned in a previous blog entry, we are still waiting for the updated COBIT 4.1 to ITIL v3 mapping which is apparently close to completion - at the time of writing not published on the ISACA website).

After a high level summary of the content of COBIT (and I mean high-level!) the point was made that, when considering the introduction of IT governance and IT Service Management, a top-down approach should be used, i.e. IT Governance first and IT Service Management next. As with ITIL implementations, they recommend that you select the bits that are immediately relevant to you to solve business issues rather than trying to implement all domains in one go.

There was nothing else that leapt out at me during the presentation other than:
1. Reference to the COBIT Maturity model, level 3 is considered to be 'compliant'.
2. I believe that Rob Stroud (apologies if it is George Ataya) is currently writing a service management guide to 'implementing COBIT in your environment'. It's already on my 'to buy' list :)

The final part of this series will be on Friday as I have already written it (I am testing the new Blogger scheduling function which if it works, may lead to more regular updates).