Representing IT Governance Frameworks as Metamodels

Up to now, there is little academic support for the challenges of IT management. As a reaction, various best practice frameworks were developed, which can be subsumed under the topic IT governance. These still have no sound basis or scientific foundation. To undertake a step in this direction we present a metamodel of COBIT, the popular IT governance framework. A major goal of this paper is to represent the underlying logical and semantically rich structure of this framework. This turns out to be fruitful for comparing and integrating different frameworks. Furthermore, frameworks can be checked for completeness and can be integrated on this basis. An interesting application is the representation of IT governance frameworks in a tool, which is demonstrated in the paper as well.