What are Cobit 5 Enablers?

Enablers are factors that, individually and collectively, influence whether something will work—in this case, governance and management over enterprise IT. Enablers are driven by the goals cascade, whereby higher-level IT-related goals define what the different enablers should achieve.

COBIT 5 defines 7 enablers which are ordered as follows;

• Principles, policies and frameworks which translate the desired behaviour into practical guidance for day to day management.
• Processes which describe an organized set of practices and activities to achieve certain objectives. These also produce a set of outputs that support the achievement of IT-related goals.
• Organizational structures which are key decision-making entities in an enterprise
• The Culture, ethics and behaviour, of individuals and of the enterprise, are very often underestimated as a success factor in governance and management activities
• Information is pervasive throughout any organization and includes all information produced and used by the enterprise. Information is required for keeping the organization running and well governed, but at the operational level, information is very often the key product of the enterprise itself
• Services, infrastructure and applications provide the enterprise with information technology processing and services
• And finally, people, skills and competencies are linked to people and are required for successful completion of all activities and for making correct decisions taking corrective actions.
• Enablers must be considered in terms of interconnectedness as each Enabler needs the input of other Enablers to be fully effective. For instance processes need information and organisational structures need skills and behaviour. They also and deliver output to benefit other Enablers for example processes deliver information, skills and behaviour of individuals to make processes efficient.

COBIT 5 Enabler Dimensions and Performance Management :

The 7 COBIT enablers (principles, policies and frameworks, processes organizational structures, culture, ethics and behaviour, information services, infrastructure and applications, people, skills and competencies) are all described by a common structure which helps us both understand and use the enabler in practice.

All enablers consist of two major areas – enabler dimensions and enabler performance management.

The structural portion of the enabler, enabler dimensions, provides a common, simple and structured way to deal with enablers, allows an entity to manage its complex interactions and facilitates successful outcomes of the enablers while the second structural portion, the enabler performance management, supports the positive outcomes expected from the application and practical use of enablers.

 Looking at the two major structures of the enabler we see that the first part, the enabler dimensions, consists of four individual dimensions – stakeholders, goals, lifecycle and good practices. We’ll be looking at the detail of the enabler dimension is another video.

The second of the two structures consists of four questions which are used to identify and measure the achievement of goals (or lag indicators) and the application of practice (lead indicators). The four questions are:

• Are stakeholder needs addressed?
• Are enabler goals achieved?
• Is the enabler life cycle managed?
• Are good practices applied?

The first two bullets deal with the actual outcome of the enabler, and the metrics used to measure the extent to which the goals are achieved can be called ‘lag indicators’. The last two bullets deal with the actual functioning of the enabler itself, and metrics for this can be called ‘lead indicators’.