مطالعه موردی مدیریت استراتژیک تقاضا IT در سازمانها - نتیجه های اکتشافی

Strategic IT demand plays an important role in the success of a business. This process must be addressed at the strategic level by the board of directors and senior executives. This paper describes the results of an exploratory case study conducted to ascertain the status of strategic IT demand management in organizations. This case study indicates whether organizations have clear and well-defined processes and whether these processes are allocated the necessary resources, for example, whether demand interacts with the project portfolio, what use is made of this portfolio, and also what types of standards and methodologies are used for strategic IT demand management process. The results of the study provide a basis for the design of a global framework covering all three levels of the IT demand management process (strategic, tactical and operational), which we intend to use to design a methodology for strategic IT demand management.

Information technology (IT) nowadays plays a very important role in the success of a business in different organizations; it is and should be considered as a strategic element and should be an integral part of corporate governance [1]. This is the responsibility not only of IT managers, but also of the board of directors, executive management and senior executives [7]. There have been many attempts at improving IT governance over the years in order to promote satisfactory project completion. Companies have invested a lot of money to solve this problem, but have failed because they have focused on IT supply without taking into account business requirements. One of the problems facing boards of directors and financial managers is to establish how profitable IT project investments are. The major obstacle in this respect is that the strategic IT demand management process, which is part of corporate governance of IT [17], [15], [4] and a key process for business success, has been underrated. This can be attributed to the confusion of the concepts of corporate governance of IT [17], [15], [4] and IT management [13] until ISO standard 38500 [10] recently clarified the notions which are addressed at different levels of the hierarchical structure of an organization. Therefore, unless the two processes are perfectly coordinated, it is impossible to prioritize IT investments for maximum return. We have conducted a literature review of strategic IT demand management and have not found much literature dealing with this topic. The problem with this process is that there is no prescription defining processes and specifying the different activities, roles and responsibilities of senior executives that are responsible for strategic IT demand management in organizations. On this ground, we have conducted an exploratory study to learn more about what is happening in organizations. The objectives of this study were as follows: • Find out how important a role IT plays in organizations with a view to achieving business success. • Review and analyse the extent to which the concept of strategic IT demand management in organizations is recognized, established and accepted. • Determine the standards and methodologies that are currently used in organizations for strategic IT demand management. • Determine the impact of current interest in specific topics related to strategic IT demand management. In this case, we have included portfolio management and its use in organizations. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes how the research was carried out taking into account the research methodology, the context of research and investigation related to the study. Section 3 summarizes the results of the study concerning the importance of IT. Section 4 provides a classification of the study responses. Section 5 discusses the case study. Finally, we present the conclusions and future work in Section 6.

Regarding the importance of the role of information technology in their organizations, 47 per cent of respondents stated that IT plays the role of a strategic business function, whose day-to-day operation is of concern to the board of directors and the general management of their organizations. Of the respondents, 38 per cent stated that their organization does not have clear and defined processes which are allocated the necessary resources for the business and strategic IT demand management process. Thirty-nine per cent of respondents that stated that there are clear and defined processes which are allocated the necessary resources in their organization claimed that project portfolio management processes, which are a key element for business and strategic IT demand management, have not been implemented. With respect to IT project portfolio use, 33 per cent of respondents said that the project portfolio is used for the management and control of on-going projects and to control the allocation of resources across the projects in their organizations. Another 28 per cent of respondents said that the IT project portfolio is used to determine whether the projects have produced the expected benefits and to control the project investment life cycle and ascertain the generated business value. Note that organizations use a variety of portfolios, for instance, 80 per cent use a service portfolio, 75 per cent use a project portfolio and 50 per cent use an IT application portfolio. It is surprising that 98 respondents did not answer the question regarding the use of standards and methodologies for strategic IT demand management, and the few who did provided very different responses. The standards or methodologies that they stated were used are really for operational management. Senior executives are clearly not using appropriate standards or methodologies, perhaps because there is a shortage of standards or methodologies for this management process. Companies that have taken part in this pilot study are mostly engaged in the IT industry based in different countries around the world, where most participants were from the continents of America and Europe and most respondents were from the countries of Spain and Peru.