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COBIT 5 is a commonly used IT Governance Framework. Its first principle is that all IT related activities should support generating value for the enterprise. This principle is put in practice through the COBIT 5 Goals Cascade. In this paper the author has researched this principle's main claimed benefit, i.e. that it allows to prioritise IT related processes based on overall enterprise priorities. The quality of the goals cascade was researched by looking at the accuracy of the published mapping tables, the dependencies between goals in the same goal set and the sensitivity of the Goals Cascade towards input variations. The author concludes that the current Goals Cascade isn't very useable as a prioritisation mechanism for IT processes. The author finally proposes an improvement to the current Goals Cascade, consisting of an additional, limited set of ‘Enterprise Strategies' that map directly to IT related processes. A prototype solution has been tested, showing promising improvements.

Rooted in the conformance perspective of IT governance, this paper sets out to research the role of compliance requirements in IT governance implementation, and to shed light on what aspects (i.e., processes) of IT governance are important under different levels of compliance requirements. Based on a large and diverse sample of organizations (N=2566), our results indicate that IT governance implementation level (over five different process domains) consistently goes up with increasing compliance requirements, and that these jumps in IT governance implementation levels are always statistically significant. Moreover, we identify the IT governance processes that are of primary importance for each level of compliance requirements.

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