TABLE OF CONTENTS "Most business men generally are so busy coping with immediate and piecemeal matters that there is a lamentable tendency to let the 'long run' or future take care of itself".
Gustav Metzman
We often are so busy "putting out fires", so to speak, that we find it difficult to do the planning that would prevent those fires from occurring in the first place. As a prominent educator has expressed it, Americans generally "spend so much time on things that are urgent that we have none left to spend on those that are important." When we ran across this quote in our efforts to ensure that we gave credit where credit was due we immediately knew that it was the right quote to use in chapter 6. The words "business men" easily lend themselves to be substituted by "IT Professionals" and in doing so sums up the existence of most IT Professional and articulates why COBIT identified Planning and Organization as one of their Domains and conversely ITIL identification of similar components in Service Delivery. Because as part of daily life within IT organizations, fires generally tend to get the highest priority and unfortunately the areas where IT can really add value to a company, such as planning and documentation, are usually relegated to the back-burner.
In this chapter we will look at the numerous control objectives in the COBIT Planning & Organization domain and ITIL Service Delivery counterparts and based on our experience offer suggestions on...
