I’m a great fan of the COBIT and VAL-IT frameworks, but I also like to try and reconcile complex frameworks. I also hire a translation company at https://www.espressotranslations.com/gb/french-translation-services-london/ to make them a bit easier to understand for our non-native English speakers. I also like to talk in terms of people, process and technology, as I think that conceptually we can easily get our heads around it, and it also helps us turn complex things into stuff we can use in a small business and specially in home based business.
Frameworks like COBIT provide us with a way of distilling out the unnecessary. It is so easy with an IT area to have it seem so complex that you don’t know where to start. COBIT lets us see what matters, and it provides a strong link between the strategic direction and management of the business, and allows us to identify from those business goals the things that the IT area needs to be doing That is the fundamental basis of the Getting IT Right service line that I provide through my company, Applied Insight Pty Ltd. It isn’t just something I made up, it has a real basis in research into the practice of IT management.
So for the effective business reporting presentation, I have taken the people-process-technology relationship, added environmental factors in the context of the financial reporting system (so, financial capacity, regulatory compliance, and business strategy), and then linked this to the COBIT process framework (DS11 – Data Management).
This approach can be seen here:
And linking through, I can, using this approach, give you a framework you can use to diagnose and assess the effectiveness of your financial reporting systems:
I have done this simply by identifying the key words in the COBIT control objective identified – it talks about words like ‘complete’, ‘accurate’, valid’ etc (as referred to in blue), and then you have a coherent, flexible, approach to the delivery of effectiveness business reporting without the need to make it up (so we know it’s complete) but not so complex and rich that it can’t be understood.
If I as a business can take these factors and score them
in some way, I have a good approach for assessing the health of my business reporting systems. And that is half of the purpose of the presentation coming up is anyway.