Comparison and Integration of IT Governance Frameworks to support IT Management

Recent years have seen an unprecedented consolidation of best practice know-how in various areas of IT management. With it came a certain popularity of standards and reference models (COBIT, ITIL, CMMI, ISO/IEC 27000 family etc.) commonly classified as frameworks for IT governance. Each of these frameworks aims to support certain parts of IT management with best practice knowledge and enhances the quality of the delivered IT Services. But now we are facing a situation characterised by an abundance of these IT governance frameworks. In particular their combined or parallel usage increasingly creates redundancies and issues of complexity. To organise an efficient interaction between frameworks and to cope with their heterogeneity; e.g. in process semantics and description techniques; the application of these frameworks has become a lively issue of research. In this contribution the authors will reflect on the state of the art in comparing and integrating IT governance frameworks, analyse pros and cons of various approaches, and present their own approach based on metamodelling. The authors consider metamodelling a promising approach to close the gap between high-level comparison and detailed mapping as it allows an identification of redundancies and incoherent semantics on a framework-independent level. Promising an increasing return on investment, harmonisation is an important topic within IT departments (Siviy et al., 2007). This approach is a first step toward an integrated and harmonised handling of the meanwhile mandatory frameworks for IT management.