COBIT 2019 enterprise and alignment goals

By Sam Rivera, Founder, SentinelPanda · June 20, 2026 · 1 min read · COBIT 2019

The enterprise and alignment goals are COBIT's shared vocabulary for "what the business wants" and "what IT must deliver" — the rungs of the goals cascade.

A shared vocabulary

COBIT 2019 defines a standard set of enterprise goals — generic business outcomes (across financial, customer, internal, and growth perspectives) — and alignment goals, the IT-related outcomes that support them. Together they give organisations a common language for connecting business intent to IT delivery.

The middle of the cascade

In the goals cascade, these sit between stakeholder needs at the top and the specific governance/management objectives at the bottom. Stakeholder needs drive enterprise goals; enterprise goals map to alignment goals; alignment goals map to the COBIT objectives. The enterprise and alignment goals are the translating layer.

Why generic goals help

Providing a standard set of goals means you do not invent them from scratch — you select and prioritise from a vetted list and use COBIT's mappings to find the alignment goals and objectives that support them. It accelerates the cascade and keeps it consistent and comparable.

Using them

Identify the few enterprise goals that matter most to your strategy, follow the mappings to the alignment goals and then the priority objectives, and focus governance effort there. It is how COBIT turns "support the business" into a concrete, prioritised set of IT objectives.