Information Technology Service Management to streamline decision making in UTAD – An e-governance case study

The application of the concept of e-Governance has been demonstrated in several countries, Portugal included, and one of the areas that has manifested greater interest in its application to Education, with a major focus for HEIs. This application is possible to validate in this article through the case study of the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD). Using an Enterprise Architecture (EA) to manage its e-Governance component, this institution has identified the need to invest in Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) to streamline decision making in IT infrastructure management and user support. Higher education institutions (HEIs) make big efforts to provide more efficient services, to increase the means of communication between the parties and to manage in a more expeditious way the business processes and the information that they originate, aiming to obtain satisfaction and quality of the services provided. In order to operationalize these efforts, to dynamize and accelerate in a secure and permanent way the access and the delivery of information, we’ve focused on resources supported by the Information Systems/Information and Communication Technologies (IS/ICT) binomial, which refers to the application of the e-Governance concept. Given the complexity of managing e-Governance, institutions often rely on Business Process Management (BPM) frameworks, and Enterprise Architectures (EA).