IT Organization Modeling and Assessment Tool (ITOMAT)

How can the performance of your IT organization be assessed?

Is there a connection between good IT organization quality, and good outcome of IT in terms of fulfillment of business needs?

The ongoing ITOMAT study tries to answer these questions by conducting case studies within a large number of organizations, in Sweden and abroad. If you're interested in participation, please contact  Mårten Simonsson, Ph. D. Student.

The ITOMAT research project started in 2006 as an attempt to explore the field of IT governance. It was soon discovered that a best practice framework to assess the quality of an IT organization already exists - It is called Control OBjectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT). Even though COBIT is widely accepted, it falls short in regards to several aspects. See Table 1 below. The content of the table is more thoroughly explained in Simonsson, 2007.

Table 1. A comparison of COBIT and ITOMAT

It was therefore decided to try overcoming the shortages in COBIT and develop a new tool to support IT organization assessment. A modeling approach was used. The endeavor was called ITOMAT - IT Organization Modeling and Assessment Tool. Such a tool has now been created, and in the remainder of 2007 and early 2008, ITOMAT will be used to assess the quality of several IT organizations (internal metrics).  In parallel, information regarding the organizations' economic performance and the business' perception of the quality of the IT delivered (External metrics) will be collected. See Figure 1. Given sufficient empirical data, the findings will allow us to foresee the expected quality of an IT organization by looking at just a few metrics, i.e. finding which IT processes that really affect economic outcome or percepted quality of IT services. Further, we may suggest changes and delimitations to the current COBIT framework, that is far too extensive to conduct quick assessments of IT organization quality.

Figure 1. Correlation of Internal and External metrics. Do e.g. IT processes with high maturity (surrounded by red ellipses) correlate with good results for external metrics? In the study, we will find out.

Last but not least, the findings from the study will result in a Ph. D. Thesis to be defended by Mårten Simonsson in spring 2008.  If you have any questions or concerns regarding ITOMAT, or if your company is interested in participation, please don't hesitate to contact Mårten Simonsson. Below, some publications related to  ITOMAT are listed.

Author: Mårten Simonsson, Pontus Johnson, Hanna Wijkström
Title: Model-based IT Governance maturity assessments with Cobit
In: European Conference on Information Systems
Date: June 2007

Author: Mårten Simonsson, Pontus Johnson
Title: Assessment of IT Governance - A Prioritization of Cobit
In: Proceedings of the Conference on Systems Engineering Research
Date: April 2006

Author: Mårten Simonsson, Mathias Ekstedt
Title: Getting the Priorities Right - Literature vs Practice on IT Governance
In: Proceedings of Portland International Center for Management of Engineering Technology
Date: July 2006