Structuring Your Approach to IT Governance: How COBIT and Play Therapy are the Same.
In my 1st professional life I was a play and family therapist. It was a job I had aspired to almost as long as I knew one had to ‘do something’ for a living. The training for it was extensive. I volunteered for years on the suicide help line and worked as a ‘house manager’ in a Catholic Charities home while I was in undergraduate school. In grad school I volunteered in local clinics and interned at our local MHMR’s information and referral office. My boss liked me and what I did so after learning what I wanted to do she marched me over to a different unit in our mental health services and I was hired as a play and family therapist right before I graduated.
It was the role many of my peers in school were desperate to have. The folks I went to school with had ‘theories of mind’, so to speak, based on their understanding of the academic work we did and more often than not when I asked about their theory of mind I was told that it was ‘eclectic’.
Which means that instead of dedicating themselves to understanding one integrated, structured, theory of mind, they essentially picked and chose what they felt were the best principles from all of the work we studied.
In hopes of ‘steelman’ing their argument, what they might have been saying was “I’ve studied each of these systems and each of them has something valuable to offer. I’m unwilling to endorse the entire structure, but I’m also unwilling to abandon something that is clearly useful.’
All of that is somewhat supportable, however, when you’re faced with a client that presents a problem in real time and you have to provide guidance and relief fast, it falls apart.
The eclectic ‘system’ isn’t a system at all; it's really just a gathering of ideas. Many of them good but also, almost always, lacking in the cohesion and structure necessary to holistically understand the system and use that understanding to reduce detriment and realize benefits.
Natch, IT is the same.
‘Eclectic’ approaches to IT governance attempt to focus on the most important drivers to the business, but without linking them together in some coherent way, the causes you’re not even aware of are having effects you are only too aware of. And without a structured approach to understanding the problem you might never be able to uncover the real drivers in the mystery.
COBIT structures IT governance allowing for a cascade of goals that reduces detriment and allows for the realization of IT benefits. It’s not eclectic. Using COBIT forfeits the best of all other systems ‘cuz you’re only using one.
However, by using one quality comprehensive structure the organization throws a net over the known universe of causes and capabilities of IT. Drilling down on the signals one gets from that process has a high probability of protecting and promoting the interests of the organization while providing guideposts for future efforts.
And, I was, and remain, a cognitive behavioral guy.