ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first discovered COBIT® in 2004 when Gary Hardy (“father of COBIT®”) visited the company I worked for in Reading, UK to discuss COBIT® and to explain that ISACA® was about to plan a COBIT® Foundation course. Unfortunately, as I was teaching an ITIL® course that day, I didn’t get a chance to meet him, but I immediately downloaded COBIT®3 and was surprised to discover it had 34 processes compared to ITIL V2, which had just 10 processes. Gary had asked my manager, Sue Kilford, if someone who was an ITIL trainer with experience of Foundation course syllabi could attend a meeting at the University of Antwerp Management School (UAMS) to discuss the syllabus for a COBIT® Foundation Certification Course that ISACA® wished to create as an online course. I was delighted to be asked to attend that meeting.

At the two-day meeting, I met Erik Guldentops (“grandfather of COBIT®”), Gary Hardy (“father of COBIT®”) and I was also introduced to Professor Wim van Grembergen, Chair of Information Systems Management at UAMS, a leading academic researcher in the field of IT governance whose textbooks written with Associate Professor Steven de Haes would later enlighten me. That meeting was when I became an IT governance enthusiast and I participated in further meetings to help define the COBIT® Foundation Certificate syllabus that came to life with an ISACA® online course and online exam in 2005.

I’d like to thank Sue Kilford for inviting me to get involved in COBIT® with its enthusiastic leaders Erik Guldentops and Gary Hardy, who have certainly educated me continually about COBIT®. Another COBIT® expert who has helped me considerably is Roger Southgate, who not only regularly presented about COBIT® at ISACA® meetings I attended in London, but also with Gary Hardy taught an Implementing COBIT® Certificate course that I attended at an ISACA® conference in London in 2006, enabling me to become an ISACA® accredited trainer for COBIT® in 2006 when classroom-based courses started.

Key to my success in the area of COBIT® training and consultancy has been Alan Calder, CEO of IT Governance Ltd, Ely, UK who in 2007 agreed to schedule COBIT® Foundation and COBIT® Implementation training courses using my company, Maat Consulting, and created opportunities for me to develop and teach other IT governance courses including CGEIT®. I also thank IT Governance staff Donna Garner for organising and managing training events for COBIT® and Elizabeth Quashie for setting up my accreditations with APMG for COBIT® and keeping me informed of the continually changing world of APMG/ISACA® qualifications.

I was delighted to be contacted by Vicki Utting of IT Governance Publishing (ITGP) with a request to write this textbook, and I thank her and her team for their advice, waiting a long time for me to complete it and for their editorial reviews. I would like to thank the following reviewers for their helpful suggestions: Brian Johnson, CA; Mark Thomas CGEIT, President, Escoute Consulting and S. D. Van Hove, Ed.D., FSM® SED-IT, CEO & Founder.

I thank my mother, Connie, and my late father, Frank, for their continual encouragement while supporting me at school and university and Nigel Kermode who persuaded me to become an IT professional instead of a physicist by recruiting me to Digital Equipment Company (DEC) in 1982.