IT Management Processes

Information technologies (IT) play, today, a strategic role in the majority of public and private organizations. The success of an organization, in a global economy and interconnected world, depends on these technologies and the way they are managed.

The alignment between business and IT, the frequency of the technological changes and the lack of understanding of business processes by the IT staff are three of the most common problems that an IT manager must face. 

Enterprise Architecture (EA), seen as a management practice, has won a lot of attention and importance in recent years. Its main contribution is in solving the three problems aforementioned. The implementation of this practice, in an organization, leads to a product of the same name – an enterprise architecture, which is defined as "a description of the goals of an organization, how the goals are realized by business processes, and how these business processes can be better served through [information] technology". An important aggregate value of EA is to provide, to the IT management, with a better understanding of the business processes, their supporting information systems, and the IT platform used to implement and operate these systems.

In this article, we define IT Management as a set of business processes whose main objectives are to plan, implement, operate, maintain, and improve the enterprise architecture of an organization. In most medium and large companies, this process is executed by an organizational unit that is positioned at the highest hierarchical managerial level. To refer to this organizational unit we will use, in this article, the term "IT Department". 

According to the proposed definition, the EA must be the center of attention of an IT department. The components of this architecture are the resources or the business objects that an IT department must manage.

An enterprise architecture is a description of the following components or elements of a company or organization (or of a part of it): 

• The objectives of the business, its business processes, and activities, its actors and its business rules; 

• The information systems that the company needs to run these business processes; and 

• The software, hardware, and network platforms or infrastructures, on which the information systems are developed, installed, and managed. 

These components determine three levels or layers called: Business Architecture, Information Systems Architecture, and Technology Architecture, respectively.

The concept of EA is not new. It has been used since the decade of the 80s with the well-known framework of Zachman. However, it is in the last few years that this concept has gained increasing importance. This is due to the so-called problems of the lack of alignment between IT and business.

These problems have led to the resurgence of the EA as a discipline that has created a set of reference models, methods, and bodies of knowledge; among which are the frameworks TOGAF, DODAF, TEAF, and the body of knowledge EABOK. These models and frameworks provide a comprehensive overview of the concepts, processes, and resources that an IT department is required to manage.

In parallel to the evolution of EA, different models have emerged that prescribe specific IT management processes. The most prominent ones are: ITIL V3, CMMI-Dev, COBIT, and DAMA. The first of them is oriented toward the management of IT services; CMMI-Dev focuses on software development processes; COBIT proposes a set of control objectives of particular importance for IT governance; meanwhile, DAMA describes a process model for data management. None of them covers, by itself, all the processes that an IT department should execute.

The IBM Process Reference Model for IT is an exception. It provides a set of methods and techniques for identifying and improving all areas associated with IT within an organization. Based on the IBM extensive IT management experience, this model extends ITIL through the incorporation of service management practices into IT management processes. This model groups all IT management processes into eight categories: governance and management, customer relationships, direction, realization, transition, operations, resilience, and administration. The description of the internal management processes and their interrelationships lets IT managers improve the control and implementation of IT processes; which facilitates the IT alignment with the objectives and priorities of the organization. Being an extension of ITIL, this model is based on a service management approach to IT management. The notion of enterprise architecture is completely absent in the structure of this model.

The objective of this article is to describe a comprehensive and integrated process model for IT management based on the EA approach. This approach provides a complete and well-structured framework that facilitates the integrated management of the three levels of an enterprise architecture: the business architecture, the information systems architecture and the technology architecture.

In addition to using the enterprise architecture as the focus of attention of IT management, our model is distinguished from the aforementioned models and frameworks in two aspects. Firstly, we use a value chain to divide IT management processes into two separated groups of processes: fundamentals processes to EA management and supporting processes. Secondly, IT management processes are modeled as a set of business process using a well-known UML extension to business. By doing so, the set of IT management processes may be seen and treated as a constituent part of the Business Architecture.

The rest of this article is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the Business/IT Alignment as one of the main problems that IT managers must face today. Section 3 presents a summary the main EA concepts. Section 4 describes our process model to IT management. Each process of our model is described, with the detail that the page limit of the article allows, in sections 5 and 6. Finally, section 7 discusses the contribution of the model and its applicability in medium and large organizations.