IT Responsibility Model

The IT Responsibility Model gives business leaders a clear view of the responsibilities involved in managing the technology their organization depends on. It connects those responsibilities to business direction and provides a practical way to understand what needs attention, who owns it and how well it is being managed.

At Pye Advisory Group, we use the model to guide reviews, clarify responsibilities and identify where improvement would be useful. This is especially valuable when technology work is shared between employees and outside providers, and leadership needs a complete picture of how those arrangements support the business. The model helps us bring that picture together and establish priorities that reflect the organization’s needs and capacity.

The model builds on COBIT, an established framework that provides the foundation for its coverage of technology governance and management.

The COBIT Foundation

COBIT is ISACA’s framework for governing and managing business information and technology. Its 40 objectives are organized into five domains covering oversight, planning, implementation, operations and assessment. COBIT can be tailored to smaller organizations, and ISACA provides guidance for doing so. However, the material can be challenging for non-technical executives to follow, and makes implementation better suited to dedicated IT professionals.

Our approach makes those responsibilities easier to navigate through business language and a more explicit connection to business direction.

COBIT is a great framework for an established IT department in a medium or large enterprise, but it can be overwhelming and difficult to understand for small to medium-sized businesses that have limited or outsourced IT support.

A Structure for Business Conversations

The IT Responsibility model is a blend of COBIT and Pye Advisory Group (“PAG”) content, with a structure that retains all 40 COBIT objectives, reorganizing them around direction, capability, delivery and continuous improvement. PAG practices make areas such as business alignment, investment choices, application ownership and feedback more explicit. Values, vision, mission and business strategy provide the context for the model.

To make the model easier for businesses to understand, the questions that are answered with the IT Responsibility Model are:

• What are we trying to do? (“Business Context”)
• Where are we trying to go? (“Direction”)
• Can we do it? (“Capability”)
• How and when will we do it? (“Delivery”)
• How will we maintain and support it (“Continuous Improvement”)

The resulting map covers a total of 80 IT and IT/Business Shared responsibilities, giving leadership a basis for reviewing ownership, discussing service expectations and deciding where attention is needed. The depth of each responsibility depends on the business, with ownership assigned across employees, advisors and external providers according to the work and expertise required.

Details on PyeAG specific content can be found in the PAG26 IT Responsibility Model Reference Material.