The COBIT Delivery & Support phase ensures that not only do systems perform as expected upon implementation but they continue to perform in accordance with expectations over time usually managed "via SLAs". Now as part of Chapter 8 we will look at the specifics of each of the control objectives of the "Delivery & Support Domain", summarize and distill the various control objectives to lend themselves more to the structure of a small to medium size company and correlate them as appropriate to ITIL.

Not to minimize the significance and/or effort required for any of the previous COBIT Domains and ITIL components, but without a doubt Delivery & Support is probably the one that will cause the most concern in a small to medium size company. The concern will more then likely rise out of two concerns 1) given the number of IT resources can these activities be sustained and 2) is there really a need for all this bureaucracy. If we have accomplished nothing else hopefully by now you have come to realization that the answer to the first concerns is yes. Although the answer to the second concern is yes as well, if the right Open Source tools are implemented the gains in efficiencies, security, user satisfaction and environmental stability will more then sufficiently mitigate the introduction of any bureaucracy. Similar to the "personal processes" process we discussed in Chapter 6 and the need to understand your company's culture, there is also a need to...