Over the years, we have realized as have others, that ITIL by itself does not provide the complete solution when it comes to following certain standards to ensure best delivery. At Stratogent, we continually improve our delivery methods by combining the best of industry standards and known best practices in specific technology areas.

We now use COBIT's Key Performance Indicators, Maturity Models and RACI Charts (which track Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed persons for every process) to provide metrics and structure for our ITIL processes.

COBIT is the governance framework that aligns business strategies and objectives with IT deliverables by identifying and analyzing the IT processes and measurements needed to construct processes that deliver desired business results.

COBIT provides the missing governance capabilities for ITIL processes, helping to measure and assure performance and roll up the metrics to business requirements to provide a holistic view of the performance.

While ITIL does offer performance measurements and organizational information, these don't roll up to the business level to the extent COBIT does.

For example, COBIT process DS1, Define and Manage Service Levels, which is defined as control over the IT processes of defining and managing service levels with the objective of ensuring the alignment of key IT services with business strategy. COBIT identifies requirements, inputs, outputs, report requirements, organizational impact, metrics and the maturity model (every COBIT process has its own maturity model to show where we are and where we are going) -- all of which assists in implementing ITIL.

Stratogent is an ISACA active member and our procedures are defined and based on the subsets of the following 4 domains of COBIT v4:

• Plan and Organize
• Acquire and Implement
• Deliver and Support
• Monitor and Evaluate

Stratogent cross-maps the COBIT framework to the key factors from the ITIL v3 library:

• Service Strategy
• Service Design
• Service Transition
• Service Operation
• Continual Service Improvement

Finally, in each area of technology, there are vendor guidelines, best practices and finally, workarounds. At Stratogent, we constantly evaluate the new developments in each technology area to ensure that we are ahead of the game and can help our customers.

At Stratogent, the goal is to not abuse these standards for introducing rigidity that will hamper service delivery, but rather create comfortable margins within which the daily and hourly realities of delivery can fit in. That's what creates the best experience for our customers.