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An experience to improving IT development into developing country public sector organizations

Abstract:

Following a Design Science Research (DSR) approach, this study describes an experience of design and evaluation of a model of IT governance and management in a public sector organizations context, with the aim of organizing IT decisions and operations for continuous processes improvement. DSR prescribes to use two phases: Artifact Design and Evaluation; additionally, for data collection, the Participant Observation method is utilized. The artifact design is based on significant contributions related to IT frameworks applications. Likewise, it is built on theoretical IT related models (BITA, BDIM), and on IT norms and professional frameworks (COBIT, ISO 20000) that provide guidelines inspired by practice. The result is a model that starts in an IT strategic alignment and continues with IT process identification. Following a Deming Cycle, the model takes into account the components of IT governance and management. The improvement requirements should cover multiple municipal companies that have their strategic planning. The design identifies the required IT processes to meet the common institutional IT objectives, in a network context of enterprises, where the frameworks simplification does not provide an alternative to implement several requirements. In this work, it is used the processes assessment (ISO 15504) as prioritization alternative. The artifact was evaluated through a case study in the Quito-Ecuador Metropolitan District, a decentralized autonomous government in a developing country. Some critical processes were implemented in the most important municipal company and monitored during a period. The results evidence the technical and managerial implementation difficulties in a developing country IT environment, where the model requirements reveal the multifaceted goals of stakeholders, and the IT evaluation outcomes evidence the risk aversion that difficult the changes. In any case, the evaluation process shows the model operability and applicability. Thus, the described experience provides a practical tool for practitioners, and it contributes to the existing body of knowledge both about artifacts design and on IT development into developing country Public Sector Organizations.