ISYS90048 Managing ICT Infrastructure and Key Components

1. Introduction

• Information is a strategic resource which is used for functions and making crucial decisions for the local government. Along with its physical, human and financial resources, the local government should maintain its resources which are enabled to meet the required community needs and the priorities that have been set by the council.
• The resources which are needed to implement these set of plans are identified and managed by the asset management plans, workforce and financial plans (Mangalaraj, Singh and Taneja 2014). These resources can be planned and managed so that they provide the objectives and priorities for the strategy for the organizations as well as it ensure the continuity of the business from its day to day operations (Miller 2017).
• The ICT Strategic Framework sets out some key components that are need to manage the organization’s information resources. It shows the relationship that the organizations expect to get an ideal environment (Stroud 2014).
• It is mainly useful for the organizations that are generally big in size and should also understand the complexity of the individual local government (AlHogail 2015). The ICT or Information and Communication Technology mainly focuses on the technology that will help in storing, retrieving, manipulating, transmitting and also helps in receiving information electronically or in a digital form which includes the hardware and communicating devices like the network infrastructure, video conferencing, telephone and mobile phones (Suhairi and Gaol 2013).
• It has become the integral part of the local government which helps them in delivering the services like information sharing and giving advice, to give a better view on the environment, social change, better use of the land for better management and planning (Belleflamme and Lambert 2016). It also helps in supporting the back operations on the behalf of local government, provides data storage, proper information management and communication via email and mobile.

1.1 Report Objectives

: justify;">The main objective of the following report is to evaluate the main differences between COBIT and ITIL Frameworks and represents their diversification in the field of technology. Also recommending the organization about the future scope of using COBIT and assessing the problems that they are facing now by using ITIL and how they can overcome by using COBIT framework. Also it shows the advantages of COBIT over ITIL and how the organization can benefit from it (Maidin, Othman and Ahmad 2014). Detailed explanation of future scope for the organization while using COBIT as a framework.

2. Background

COBIT and ITIL are both famous frameworks which are used in organization to organize and also helps them in reviewing the status of their organization. As COBIT is relatively new compared to ITIL therefore it holds many advantages over the later one like it supports many new application and the complexity is COBIT is quite minimal so it becomes easy for the people to understand and identify the problems that are related with it (Haes and Grembergen 2015). It also discuss the possibilities of the organization that might face while using the COBIT as a framework

3. Analysis

As per the requirements, a detailed analysis has been performed by reading the literature reviews and by doing a quantitative analysis on both COBIT and ITIL frameworks.

3.1 Choice of Framework

After going through all the literature reviews and doing a quantitative analysis, COBIT has been preferred more over the ITIL due to its simplistic nature. With COBIT, all the problems are mentioned in a structured way which makes it easy to understand while on the other hand, ITIL does a narrative review on the problems (Mangalaraj, Singh and Taneja 2014). COBIT covers all the areas of the organization and helps in identifying all the underlying problems that persists within an organization but with ITIL it is not possible to cover all the areas (De Haes et al. 2013). The analysis of COBIT is done by a group of people which makes it quite easy and after generating the report, it is reviewed by another group of people which helps to identify the errors which are present in the report while in ITIL, the review is done with the help of one person only and is not reviewed later which can create a problem as there may be some errors which will not be identified until and unless it is being implemented (Belleflamme and Lambert 2016). COBIT also helps in governing the organization in a more effective and efficient way which is not possible using the ITIL framework. Also COBIT is quite robust and fully packed with features which is missing in ITIL as it is quite old and is not compatible with new applications that are currently present in the market.

3.2 Detailed Analysis

The following analysis has been performed based on the advantages and disadvantages of COBIT and ITIL and how they are being used in an organization and if not what the organization is lacking.

After doing the detailed analysis, it has been found that the organization, “City of Albany” still uses the out dated framework ITIL which they should consider replacing with COBIT in order to gain more profit and this will also help in achieving their goals and will increase the productivity and helps in increasing the efficiency of the employees.

Key Findings and Recommendations

COBIT and ITIL are two very famous frameworks which are being used by an organization. ITIL is relatively older compared to COBIT for which COBIT has got many new functions which ITIL lacks. COBIT also supports the new application and also the implementation of COBIT is relatively cheaper than the ITIL and the system requirements are quite basic for COBIT. COBIT’s coverage is also quite big as while addressing the problems, it checks all the problems from all the areas and produce a structured analysis of the problems while in ITIL, it produces a narrative analysis which becomes much difficult to read (Belleflamme and Lambert 2016). Complexity of COBIT is quite less compared to ITIL due to its long narrative way of presenting the analysis. COBIT also helps in governing the organization more effectively and in a more efficient way which is not possible while using the ITIL; the organization finds it difficult to govern the company (Safari 2014).

Due to the above mentioned topics, City of Albany should consider using COBIT and should give up ITIL because COBIT is more advanced in every aspect and supports all the latest application and softwares that are present today.

The main thing that can be outlined from the above report is that COBIT is much better than that of ITIL. COBIT helps in indentifying the errors that are present within the organization which was not possible using ITIL. Also, COBIT gives a detailed structure of the problems which later on becomes quite easy to understand and analyze but in case of ITIL, as it in narrative form, it becomes difficult to understand the problems and more difficult to analyze them (Zhang and Le 2013). COBIT covers a vast area of the organization so it covers all the problems from every section of the organization but ITIL’s coverage is limited so every problem is not being identified (El Yamami, Mansouri and Qbadou 2016). City of Albany is facing quite a problem in using the ITIL framework like better governance is not achieved which could have been possible using COBIT. Also, the organization is not able to know all the problems that it is facing because the problem that is being analyzed is done a single person and it is not possible for a single person to go through all the problems (Almeida, Pinto and Mira da Silva 2016). Another problem using ITIL is that the report that is generated is not shared among all the employees and is kept restricted to the higher authorizes only which becomes quite troublesome as they may not find all the problems that are persisting While using COBIT, the report that is generated is carried out by a group of people and later reviewed by another group of people to see if any errors are present (De Haes et al. 2016). The final report is distributed among all the employees within the organization so that they can give their feedback and suggestions (Ali 2014). COBIT also helps in securing the data of the organization due to latest application build which is not possible while using the ITIL as it is quite older and is not compatible with the latest applications which makes it difficult for it to secure the data also there is a chance of data/information getting lost (Bartens 2014).

City of Albany is currently using the ITIL framework for which they are facing quite few challenges like they are not able to manage a defined and documented lifestyle of their ICT hardware and software using the current framework so to get a detailed analysis of their software and hardware, COBIT is most appropriate as it does not give anything in a narrative way rather it present everything with the highlighted points which makes the job easy for the personnel to understand and make changes or work accordingly (De Haes et al. 2016). It also helps in meeting the organizational goals as with this, organization can know the existing problems in an organization more efficiently as the whole analysis is done by a group of people and later it is reviewed by some other people to see if there is any fault (Haes and Grembergen 2015). Setting up a new framework like the COBIT would not cost more as it is relatively cheaper than the ITIL and supports all the existing systems and assure performance and software capability which was not possible in ITIL as it did not support for a whole lot of software (Bartens et al. 2014). COBIT can also help in improving the ICT management practices in order to reduce the power consumption, better disposal practices for ICT equipment and also reduction of printing of paper (Stroud 2014).  It also helps in making better strategic planning for the City of Albany as it is easy to understand and not so complex in nature also the report that is generated is distributed among all the parts of the organization so as to get much better feedback from everyone and to improve the functionalities of the system (Karkoskova and Feuerlicht 2015). COBIT can help in formulating the budget also that the ICT needs based on reason with clear and transparent decision making (De Haes et al. 2016). It also manages the benefits, opportunities, costs and risk that are associated with the budget making. It also serves in the long and short term needs. Another advantage of using COBIT is that it ensures the efficiency and effectiveness of the ICT services. Transparency and Accountability of ICT will be provided through effective monitoring and reporting which will help in increasing the visibility of the services that are provided by the ICT which is necessary for the business intelligence. COBIT helps in effective risk assessment which helps the organization to counterpart any problem if they face (AlHogail 2015). In this way they can expand their organization and also they can know the market in a much better way by implementing ways which were never implied before and COBIT can help them in achieving this goal.

References

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AlHogail, A., 2015. Design and validation of information security culture framework. Computers in Human Behavior, 49, pp.567-575.

Almeida, R., Pinto, P. and Mira da Silva, M., 2016. Using ArchiMate to Assess COBIT 5 and ITIL Implementations.

Bartens, Y., De Haes, S., Eggert, L., Heilig, L., Maes, K., Schulte, F. and Voß, S., 2014, May. A visualization approach for reducing the perceived complexity of COBIT 5. In International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems (pp. 403-407). Springer International Publishing.

Belleflamme, P. and Lambert, T., 2016. An Industrial Organization Framework to Understand the Strategies of Crowdfunding Platforms?. In International Perspectives on Crowdfunding: Positive, Normative and Critical Theory (pp. 1-19). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

De Haes, S., Huygh, T., Joshi, A. and Van Grembergen, W., 2016. Adoption and Impact of IT Governance and Management Practices: A COBIT 5 Perspective. International Journal of IT/Business Alignment and Governance (IJITBAG), 7(1), pp.50-72.

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