Towards a framework for analyzing IT strategy management in public sector : a case for IT organisations in the public sector

Sammanfattning: Small/medium sized public sector IT organisations combine several characteristics that difficult the effective use of an IT strategy. Research has reported small/medium sized organisations as using unstructured and informal IT management initiatives, which frequently leads to inexistent or incipient use of IT strategy. On the other hand, for public sector the use of robust management is relevant in order to ensure transparency/accountability and facilitate the obtainment of resources. However, the instability that governmental changes create to the management of municipalities as organisation does not contribute to it. With the context described the use of IT strategy is challenged in these types of organisations. IT strategy management discusses the processes/practices to develop, improve and monitor IT strategy. This is a perspective with specific processes and practices at different managerial levels (strategic, tactical and operational) that give a structure in order to produce an IT strategy. This concept provides a systematic alternative to deal with IT strategy that can support to the craft of developing a strategy. The recent introduction of the IT strategy topic in IT service management has made a contribution to this area. Therefore the use of IT strategy management following a service perspective could be a straightforward alternative to deal with IT strategy in small/medium sized IT organizations of the public sector. However, the proposals of IT service management and IT strategy management are defined to be used for IT organisations in a mature stage, which is something demanding and ambitious for the organisations that are being studied. Therefore, this research proposes an approach to use IT strategy management concept with a service perspective in these types of organisations. This thesis presents the research work implemented in order to develop alternatives for analysing IT strategy management practices in small/medium sized public sector IT organisations. The results of this work are two artefacts: a method (AITSS method) and a maturity model. Both artefacts deal with the analysis of IT strategy management using two complementary approaches. The AITSS method proposes an operational-tactical-orientated alternative to address IT strategy management in the context of small/medium sized IT organisations. The maturity model proposes a more strategy orientated alternative for improving the organisational situation of public sector IT organizations. The maturity model can be used to have a perspective of IT strategy management and the assets and environmental factors related to it; the AITSS method can be used to assess more specific practices for IT strategy management at individual level. The method and maturity model were developed following a design science approach from a qualitative perspective, considering as the unit of analysis the IT organisations of the Nicaraguan municipal governments, which therefore were used to define the context considered in this research. The main contributions to this research are, from a practical perspective, the artefacts designed for its suitability in a context that has been disregarded in previous research, and from a theoretical perspective the contextual knowledge used to design the proposed method. As consequence of this study it was observed the relevance of the context for the harnessing of IT management frameworks which are generally assumed as generic solutions for any context, but in practice are challenged for it.