COBIT® 5 Foundation Certification Training Course

Before starting on the COBIT 5 journey it is necessary to establish the context within which the framework is relevant and useful. To that end, we’ll provide a general understanding of what IT governance is and some of the challenges boards have faced, leading to a recognition of the complexity of the IT environment, with its many functions, structures, frameworks, roles etc., all of which give rise to a multitude of IT issues and risks.

In order to manage these challenges 3 viewpoints are introduced – Organization, Executive Board and Management and thirdly IT management. This is further detailed from the perspective of ineffective IT governance.

This module is the first module that begins to address the specific Learning Objectives that are mandated for the COBIT 5 Foundation exam.

ISACA is quite explicit in specifying the basic knowledge of COBIT that it expects you to have acquired in order to pass the Foundation exam.

We will look at the five principles that underpin COBIT 5 and the processes and methodologies that derive from them. Once you are confident that you have thoroughly grasped the implications of these Principles you will be ready to proceed to the next Module.

First we will take a look at the Governance Objectives implied by Stakeholder needs and then understand how these arise by looking at the various drivers involved.

From these considerations we will get an understanding how to translate the needs of the stakeholder into meaningful action. We will look at the COBIT 5 goals cascade, which is the mechanism to translate stakeholder needs into specific, actionable and customized enterprise goals, IT-related goals, and enabler goals.

In this module we will show how COBIT 5 achieves its role of a single and integrated framework. This is necessary because COBIT comprises a large body of knowledge from previous versions through to the current version but also other disciplines, standards and frameworks covering security, risk and assurance to mention just a few.

COBIT 5 is a dynamic framework with continued efforts by ISACA to continually update and extend it and also make it relevant across multiple disciplines within the enterprise IT space.

This module describes the COBIT 5 architecture and how it achieves the integration and alignment within a single framework by bringing together existing and new ISACA material with new guidance and other standards and frameworks.

This Module discusses the Fourth Principle of COBIT 5 – Enabling a Holistic Approach.

Remembering that the Learning Objectives are the specific things that will be examined in the Foundation Exam, there’s quite a lot of content here.

Fortunately, the way that COBIT5 approaches the Holistic Approach means that there is a logic behind the structures that mean these are not particularly hard to grasp.

COBIT 5 defines a set of enablers to support the implementation of a comprehensive governance and management system for enterprise IT. We will look at this in detail in this module

This Module covers a critical differentiator between COBIT and most of the other frameworks that have a Governance aspect.

What is striking about COBIT is the degree of separation and clarity of thinking predicated by the degree of separation between the aspects of Governance and Management.

This is Principle No. 5 of COBIT, and in many ways the key to the whole edifice.

The Learning objectives of Principle 5 are concerned about this separation – and also the pragmatics of the way they have to co-exist and interact – how they feed off each other might be another way of describing the relationship.

We will consider these aspects separately as a matter of academic clarity, content in the understanding that in the real world it can be a considerable intellectual challenge to suitably separate them.

This Module discusses the COBIT 5 Process Capability Model which, is part of COBIT5 foundation – and as such is a subset of ISACA’s Process Assessment Programme, which augments this aspect of the COBIT5 Framework Guidance. We will look into the Process Assessment Programme to the extent needed to support the Foundation level thinking around Assessment.

At the end of the module you should have a good understanding of the Process Capability Model and the basic ISO 15504 concepts, and the facts, terms and concepts that relate to the Process Capability Model.

The purpose of this module is to introduce the implementation and continual improvement life cycle at a high level and to highlight a number of important topics from COBIT 5 implementation such as:

1) Making a business case for the implementation and improvement of the governance and management of IT
2) Recognizing typical pain points and trigger events
3) Creating the appropriate environment for implementation
4) Leveraging COBIT to identify gaps and guide the development of enablers such as policies, processes, principles, organizational structures, and roles and responsibilities.