Harmonizing IT Frameworks and Agile Methods: Challenges and Solutions for the case of COBIT and Scrum

Information Technology (IT) is a complex domain. In order to properly manage IT related processes, several frameworks including ITIL (Information Technologies Infrastructure Library), COBIT (Control OBjectives for Information and related Technologies), IT Service CMMI (IT Service Capability Maturity Model) and many others have emerged in recent decades. Meanwhile, the prevalence of Agile methods has increased, posing the coexistence of Agile approach with different IT frameworks already adopted in organizations. More specifically, the pursuit of being agile in the area of digitalization pushes organizations to go for agile transformation while preserving full compliance to IT frameworks for the sake of their survival. The necessity for this coexistence, however, brings its own challenges and solutions for harmonizing the requirements of both parties. In this paper, we focus on harmonizing the requirements of COBIT and Scrum in a same organization, which is especially challenging when a full compliance to COBIT is expected. Therefore, this study aims to identifying the challenges of and possible solutions for the coexistence of Scrum and COBIT (version 4.1 in this case) in an organization, by considering two case studies: one from the literature and the case of Akbank delivered in this study. Thus, it extends the corresponding previous case study from two points: adds one more case study to enrich the results from the previous case study and provides more opportunity to make generalization by considering two independent cases.