Towards an abbreviated COBIT framework for use in an Australian State Public Sector

This paper details research undertaken to evaluate the potential to use the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT) framework as the basis for Information Technology (IT) audits in a state public sector audit office from Australia. The research outlined here used a survey methodology to determine the high level control objectives from COBIT considered to be the most important to a selection of public sector organisations from within that state and provides a comparison with studies by Guldentops, van Grembergen and de Haes (2002), Liu and Ridley (2005) and results from the European Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI) IT working group COBIT self-assessment. Seventeen high level control objectives were identified as being important to Tasmanian public service organisations. As eight of these were also identified by the other studies it appears possible to derive an abbreviated instrument from COBIT that would be both enduring and relevant across geographical and organisational contexts.