Can you trust the COBIT 5 Goals Cascade?

The short answer is Yes and No.  Here's why.

Everyone has been banging on for years about aligning IT with the business but the secret in achieving this has been as elusive as the Holy Grail.  Some organizations have realised this ambition by chance, while others have supposedly done all the right things, but still find that there is a disconnect between IT and the business. 

The way to get this right is simple: build IT intelligence into the enterprise strategy process and alignment will be present.  But what are the strategy processes, who presides over them (i.e. where are the accountabilities and responsibilities?), what are the outputs, and how is progress measured?

Well, it is often the case that no-one really knows except those behind the closed doors of the executive suite.

So the CobiT 4.1 development team, in their search for connecting the IT processes and business objectives, put together a series of generic business "goals" distributed across the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives and defined a set of cause-effect releationships (a "mapping") connecting processes with goals.  This became a tool for discovering what needed to be done within the IT process environment to address those business goals that were seen to be essential.  The goals cascade has now been simplified with the release of COBIT 5.

But one problem remains, and that is that for the use of the goals cascade to be relevant to the business there has to be a "mapping" between them, and the actual strategic objectives of the business, as reflected on a corporate Strategy Map and/or Balanced Scorecard.

So the message to CIOs and IT managers is this:  before you tout the COBIT 5 goals cascade to be the solution to the business' problems to justify getting into the backrooms again and perpetuating the disconnect between IT and the business, spend some time with the leadership and validate these business goals against the actual enterprise strategic objectives.  Hopefully this will bring you closer to achieving what everyone has been hoping for over the past 30 years.

If you want help in solving this and any other problem related to enterprise and IT strategy, IT governance or performance management find out more by visiting the Lode Star Strategy Consulting website.