IT Departments can and should provide value to the company.

The IT Department s main goal should be To deliver IT product or service on time and in the condition which the client was led to expect.

Most companies fail to see the value that IT Departments provide.

Systems should perform as expected upon implementation, and continue to perform in accordance with the expectations.

COBIT Domain III Delivery and Support will probably cause the most concern in a small to medium size company.

Open source tools can provide a gain in efficiency, security, user satisfaction, and environmental stability.

Establishment of good SLAs is critical to efforts to reposition an IT Department.

eGroupware and Galaxia Workflow are key open source tools that can assist you in this COBIT III Delivery and Support Domain

SLA resources and services should be tied to IT funding, and executive management should understand the correlation between IT funding and the ability to deliver agreed-upon services and service levels/

Documenting agreements should remove ambiguity and ease the reliance upon individual s recollections.

Communication is essential when managing SLAs.

The three aspects of identity management are authentication, authorization, and auditing.

Authentication must be secure (e.g., a network-sniffing program should not yield plaintext passwords on the wire).

Authentication should be transparent. In an ideal world, the end user should not know that authentication is taking place and should only...