IT Governance for Public Universities: Developing a Model

Isaias Scalabrin Bianchi and Rui Manuel Dinis Sousa

Abstract:

Information technology (IT) has become essential in supporting sustainability and growth of business of all kinds of organizations as industries, enterprises and universities. Universities are complex organization dependent on IT in that their technological infrastructure consists of a variety of applications, different platforms, academic systems, cloud applications and a heterogeneous range of technologies.  The use efficient information technology in the universities helps the process of teaching, learning and administration relies on the appropriate and good IT governance.A good IT governance requires the adoption formal practices of IT and high level of mechanisms such structures , processes and relational of mechanisms.  However, a universal framework for IT governance is inexistent, due to the fact that each organization chooses the development of their own framework depend on the organizational context. The motivations for this paper are two. First, the lack of studies of IT governance within  specific organization, universities. There are still limited number of organizations  that actually have been utilizing frameworks, and standards of IT governance. Indeed,  a literature review identified only eight works in IT governance for universities.  Despite of few works, nevertheless are a quite superficial and generic with a limited scope.  Second, the difficult of organizations to implement frameworks such as ITIL, COBIT, ISO/IEC 38500 and others.  Therefore, to solve these issues, we  propose in this paper how to develop a model with guidelines  for public univerisites using design science research. We expected to identify contingency factors such as country, type and context of organization in this case public universities in a cross cultural study. Moreover, deep  research will bring benefits for IT governance for universities with suitable mechanisms. These mechanisms will be designed for this specific kind of complex organization, universities, analysing the maturity the process, tools and software that have used.