COBIT History

COBIT (Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies) is a framework created by ISACA for Information Technology (IT) Management and IT governance.

The framework is business focused and defines a set of generic processes for the management of IT, with each process defined together with process inputs and outputs, key process-activities, process objectives, performance measures and an elementary maturity model.

International professional association ISACA first released COBIT in 1996 as a set of control objectives to aid the financial auditing community to work better around IT-related structures and is now in fifth version. Initially, COBIT was intended to provide guidance for auditors. As it gained use, there were calls for greater guidance for internal control.

The next iteration, COBIT 2, was published in 1998 and offered additional guidance for controls. As an audit and controls guidance framework, COBIT 2 gained broader exposure. The marketplace then began asking ISACA to provide greater assistance in managing the entire IT function. Additional guidance was developed and COBIT 3^rd Edition was released as a management framework in 2000.

IT governance is more inclusive than management, and the marketplace needed still greater guidance on aligning IT strategy with management. Thus, COBIT 4.0 was released as an IT governance framework in 2005. Market feedback indicated that the structure of the control objectives was more complicated than necessary, so two years later COBIT 4.1 was released with a reduced set of control objectives.

The latest evolution of the framework, COBIT 5, was published in 2012 and provides a comprehensive business framework for the governance of enterprise IT. COBIT 5 presents a model for the alignment of overall enterprise strategy with IT strategy, operates on a relatively simple foundation of five principles with seven enablers, and is aligned with several significant internationally recognized standards bodies, such as ISO/IEC and ITIL. More than 800 people provided input into the design of COBIT 5, which required nearly two years to develop and is now available in 16 languages.