26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Information technology (IT) is at the heart of digitisation of existing business models and dominates in the innovation efforts of many industries. IT has until now in many ways been regarded as exempted from the structuration and automation represented by IT. The IT4IT framework released by The Open Group in October 2015 suggests to a major change. IT has to be governed and structured along defined processes of value chains, life-cycles, service propositions, customer interaction and cost control as any other area of the organization. The purpose of this paper is to review IT4IT as a practical implementation of a Management of Technology framework and to review its perspectives and implications to the MoT society as well as the contributions it has to IT professionals, innovators and MoT practitioners. Methodologically this paper is based on an extensive case study of a large IT service provider. The IT service provider used the framework, along with other frameworks, to introduce larger degree of homogeneity of its own service “catalogues”, improved processes for navigating in the heterogeneous of its customers, and to ensure uniform processes of performance management and reporting. Methodologically this paper has been challenged by the novelty of the topic of IT4IT as only very little peer reviewed materials is available. A broad range of analogue communication channels therefore has to be reviewed and included, a.o. standards, whitepapers, blog postings, student works, professional presentations and Youtube videos. Key findings of this study are: (1) IT4IT as strong idealization of a practical MOT framework implementation especially in conversion from relative mature innovations to operational environments and life-cycle management. (2) IT4IT is driving IT further in the direction of commoditization and consumerization reducing uncertainty in IT implementation and operations and giving business stakeholders better opportunities for innovation. (3) As a MOT framework, IT4IT Conclusively, IT4IT is taking IT a step further in being a more manageable technology with more specific definitions of services, customer expectations, relationships between innovation and operations, and transparency of processes. IT4IT suggests a highly specific and novel interpretation of innovation and operations value chains that can inspire other MOT processes. Scholarly, IT4IT is new and lacks lack scale implementations, thus this paper has an ex-ante perspective and longitudinal studies must wait. Furthermore, there are discrepancies and inadequacies that must be subject for further studies. The IT4IT framework is an interesting suggestion to the MOT society for a professional framework that has gone further in governance and provides a more holistically approach than probably any earlier framework.