Law of requisite variety: a case of IT and business alignment

This paper provides an explanation of the increasing complexity of corporate IT management as a special case of application of the law of requisite variety. Frequently cited drawback of established frameworks of IT best practices like COBIT and ITIL is their complexity and related difficulty in their implementation. Through the perspective of the law of requisite variety, drawn from the field of cybernetics, we can take a more elaborated approach to this phenomenon. First, through mapping the domain of corporate IT management to the concepts from cybernetics, we ground this area in set of well defined terms. The aim of this paper is to promote the perspective, that problems with increasing complexity in IT management are directly traceable to the encompassing business environment.