Understanding IT Organizations Using Viewpoints

Abstract

Understanding IT organizations is essential for ensuring a successful transformation phase in IT outsourcing deals. However, this process of understanding is regard as a hard task, since usually there are important differences between its current (AS-IS) state and the desired (TO-BE) state. It becomes a greater problem when there are different models of both AS-IS and TO-BE states in an organization. We present a methodology based on viewpoint concepts from requirement engineering. This methodology allows us to represent and visualize distinct viewpoints models of an IT organization from several perspectives and to compare these models in order to help design changes to bring the organization from an AS-IS state to a TO-BE state.