E-Business IT Governance Revisited: An Attempt towards Outlining a Novel Bi-directional Business/IT Alignment in COBIT5

Abstract

In contrast to classical business, e-business highly depends on internet technologies. Business and IT naturally coalesce here. Thus, a customer-driven IT requirement may enforce an adjustment of a business model. This poses new challenges for researchers and practitioners as currently a business-driven alignment paradigm dominates in IT governance. We identify characteristics of e-business and examine how IT governance frameworks can integrate these characteristics under consideration of a bi-directional business/IT alignment process. We use COBIT 5 as a benchmark for our examination, and reveal a need for a modification of the framework to fully cover e-business requirements. Based on the COBIT 5 Goal Cascade, we propose a possible integration of a bottom-up requirements process. Our findings for e-business can build a basis for future research on different business models.