Brazilian companies have been looking for more effective approaches to the governance of Information Technology (IT). Therefore, they have put into practice models developed in European countries or North America and published in the literature. Researchers debate the applicability of these models, with or without adaptations, in Brazilian companies. This chapter presents and discusses a survey performed in Brazil with the objective of developing IT Governance models applicable to Brazilian companies.
TopIntroduction
Information Technology (IT) field is generally characterized as a critical mission since it provides business processes with technological support. Due to that this IT field must be strongly attached to the frequent organizational efforts that make business and their results improve and this way remain active in more competitive markets. It's essential to make sure of the use and management of IT. IT Governance is inserted in this context.
Studies that were done in 256 companies in 23 countries show that the efficiency of IT Governance is related to the type of IT decision process used by the organization and it can also become a superior factor concerning the entrepreneurial performance. However, those studies considered neither Brazilian market nor the evaluation of the use of guidelines, patterns or frameworks to aid on the implementation of IT Governance.
In order to suppress that gap, a research considering the behavior in Brazilian Organizations was done, concerning IT Governance context. It researched as sample companies that had been among the top 500 biggest and best enterprises published by Exame Magazine1.
This way, the work has shown a partial portrait of IT Governance in Brazilian organizations, according to IT Governance decision-making process. The main target as a result was to confirm, considering IT Governance, whether Brazilian organizations had an international quality pattern in their evaluations, whether they were making use of frameworks to help implement those management processes, and also, if those mentioned organizations had any type of organizational structure directed to their IT Governance fields.
Among other conclusions on how industry has been driving IT Governance management processes, this dissertation also shows suggestions on organizational and functional structure patterns towards this field. Those patterns were created based on the reality noticed during surveys done in the field of research.
The field research which was developed in this dissertation applied a questionnaire based on IT Governance structure presented by Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, researchers of the Sloan School of Management, which is a branch of Harvard University of the MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was applied in large corporations of the City of São Paulo in Brazil to identify the adherence of the model to reality observed with the executives responsible for driving IT Governance of those corporations. Those models were built as result of depositions that were retrieved in the field through live interviews for implementation of questionnaires.
During the investigation, practices that fit under a standard reference were discovered, even partially, and others that could be applied to nothing. Regarding these latest ones, the necessary adjustments were identified based on patterns that have been experienced in the real world by the practical managers of IT Governance area that participated in the survey. Thus, a new proposal addressed to the management of IT Governance was generated, which includes models of governance with its organization charts and functional description of the functions of the manager in charge of each department (besides the inclusion of a definition of their profiles, roles and responsibilities).
The survey on IT Governance models applied to the IT field in the following essay started from Figure 1 analysis in the following master´s essay. This figure shows that the following IT Governance model, when compared to other patterns of IT Management, brings up a discussion on proposals for IT Governance to be inserted in that context. In the same figure, Peterson (2003, apud Grembergen, 2004) had already presented the concept in which IT Governance would have a view more aligned to strategy instead of an operational production plan.
Figure 1. IT Governance and other patterns of IT Management (Peterson, 2003; Grembergen, 2004)
In the sequence, the literature review brought up other views about this question, which formed the theoretical reference to meet the focus of the dissertation.