Toward a Comprehensive IT Management Methodology

Information technology (IT) is a vital part of every organization today. Not only the products and services are based on IT, but also IT is necessary for supporting the organization's processes. As the role of IT becomes more eminent, IT management frameworks become more demanding. IT management guarantees the optimal utilization of IT resources within an organization. Although each of the IT management frameworks focuses on a particular part of this wide scope, implementing frameworks individually, wastes budget, and time results in incompatible or redundant artifacts. The question we want to answer in this research is if a comprehensive IT management methodology could be implemented to provide all the effective results of different IT management frameworks, yet to avoid redundancies and costs of implementing each framework separately. In this study, the integration of the ITIL framework as the most well-known IT service management framework, the COBIT framework as one of the most widely used IT management frameworks, and IT enterprise architecture as a comprehensive solution for identifying, designing, and implementing a desirable IT structure, is analyzed. We present an intuitive methodology to integrate these frameworks by investigating the elements and components of each framework and identifying the interactions of these components. To validate the proposed model, it was implemented in a company active in the transportation industry and the results were qualitatively evaluated from experts’ points of view. We found that the proposed methodology could generate all of the expected artifacts with less time and budget and could prevent the production of redundant/inconsistent outputs.