Calculation of COBIT metrics using a formal ontology

For enterprises, it is important to know how the IT infrastructure contributes to the business goals set. The COBIT IT governance framework provides a high-level view how this can be achieved. However, COBIT provides no machine-readable model that allows to refer to entities (processes, goals, actions, metrics etc.). In this paper, we present an approach to create a formal model for COBIT using an ontology. The COBIT ontology is enhanced with a formalization of metrics and a way to use selection rules and mappings to calculate metric values at runtime using data from existing systems. The calculated metric values are then inserted into the COBIT ontology and can be used for dynamic management decisions. The paper describes the modeling of the COBIT ontology and the corresponding runtime system.