A Method for Analyzing IT Service Strategy in Municipal Governments from Nicaragua

The importance of IT strategy is generally accepted, though in practice this may vary from one IT organization to another. The design of a formal IT strategy may be required or not, depending on the environment, but, independently of this, strategic decisions still must be made and therefore strategic practices are performed. In order to make any improvement in strategic practices, awareness of their current state in the IT organization is needed. This paper proposes a method for analyzing IT service strategy in the context of IT organizations in municipal governments; the main issues considered are both people- and organization-related (e.g. internal service providers, prioritized cost-effectiveness, current practices oriented to tactical and operational activities, etc.). This method decomposes the analysis from two different perspectives: strategic practices in use and maturity level of such practices. The method was tested in two municipal governments from Nicaragua

Improving a Method for Analysing Information Technology Service Strategy in Governmental Organisations in Nicaragua: Ex-post Analysis

IT organizations in early growth stages, i.e. using ad-hoc approaches for management, usually face more challenges than the regular IT organizations. The introduction of more strategic approaches suitable to their organizational limitations may contribute to deal with this situation. Previously, a method for analysing IT service strategy was presented and tested; this aimed to enable a staged improvement of these IT organisation using IT service management and maturity models. In order to improve the suitability to the context of this method, this paper presents an “after the event” evaluation procedure and its use for the improvement of such method. This is an evaluation from the perspective of the implementer, and improvements are suggested by the designer. The results provide relevant insights about the influence of the analysed context on the artefact suitability, which are used to suggest improvements oriented to provide value to its users

A Maturity Model for Analyzing Strategic IT Management from a service perspective

This paper presents the construction of a maturity model for analyzing the strategic IT service management process ofinternal IT service provider’s in early growth stages. This model is presented as an alternative tool for improving theunderstanding, from an IT service management perspective, of: (i) the strategic IT processes/practices situation in an ITorganization, and (ii) facilitate the improvement task of such IT organization. The model construction is done using acombination of best practices of IT service management and IT governance together with characteristics specific to the objectunder analysis, e.g. internal IT service providers, municipal governments standards. The model uses a wider scope forstrategic ITSM, which facilitates its applicability in IT organizations in early growth stages, giving a practical value to themodel