IT governance decision support using the IT Organization Modeling and Assessment Tool

Abstract

It is important to ensure that the IT governance is not only designed to achieve internal efficiency in the IT organization, such as deploying good IT processes and making sure that the means and goals are documented. The final goal of good IT governance is rather to provide the business with the support needed in order to conduct business in a good manner. This paper describes the IT organization modeling and assessment tool (ITOMAT) and how it can be used for IT governance decision making. ITOMAT consists of an enterprise architecture metamodel that describes IT organizations. ITOMAT further contains a Bayesian network for making predictions on how changes to IT organization models will affect the IT governance performance as perceived by business stakeholders. In order to make such predictions accurately, the network learns from data on previous experience. Thorough case studies at 20 different companies have been conducted in order to calibrate the network. Finally, the paper describes a case study where ITOMAT was used to analyze the future impact of two IT organization change scenarios in a medium sized engineering company.