Catching up with Tony Hayes – currently Chairman of the Information Technology Governance Institute’s ‘ITGI Committee’ (they’re the ones that release COBIT) – recently, Tony mentioned the new Val IT Framework that ITGI has been working on to develop as a complementary framework to COBIT. Tony happens to live in Brisbane where he is currently Executive Director of the Performance and Service Delivery Commission for the Queensland Government, after a long (long) stint with Queensland Health.Â
The Val IT Framework is designed to provide a frameweork for realising value from the investment in information technology. Currently, the framework has three components to it, all recently released: Val IT Framework, Val IT Business Case, and Val IT ING Case Study.Â
Quoting from the opening chapter, COBIT is considered to be the means by which the value from IT is delivered, whilst Val IT is considered the end product in measuring and optimising business value from information technology:
“Val IT now adds best practices for the end, providing the means to unambiguously measure, monitor and optimise the realisation of business value from investment in IT. Val IT complements COBIT from a business and financial perspective and will help all those with an interest in value delivery from IT.” (Val IT Framework p6)
I am not sufficiently versed in the Val IT Framework just yet, but if it is anything like previous ISACA publications it is a worthwhile exercise. For any medium-sized organisation, you could do worse than investigate the framework in terms of your ICT Service Delivery. There is an entire program of work in the field that the Val IT Framework is delivering upon, the initiative is built around Benchmarking and Empirical Analysis, Technique Guides and Cases, and Enterprise Exchange and Community Influence.
If you are in business, spend a significant amount on information technology (and sometimes wonder where it all went), this is a must-read for either yourself or someone in your organisation.